Virtual san stores and manages data in the form of flexible data containers called objects.
Vsan vs object storage.
Virtual san is highly.
Object storage is the only option that can effectively store this data at scale.
The data can be anything you want to store from a family photo to a 400 000 page manual for assembling an aircraft.
The vmware vsan 7 update 1 release added the vsan data persistence platform that enables software vendors to add plugins to complement vsan s file and block storage.
What is vmware vsan.
Vsan is an object based storage.
This allows for the partitioning or combination of the full storage capacity as needed.
As an example let s take that same 600gb virtual disk and apply the vsan default storage policy which uses the raid 1 mirroring failure tolerance method and has the number of failures to tolerate set to one.
Every object contains three things.
The 600gb object with three components will be mirrored on another host.
Simply put virtualized storage refers to the abstraction of storage.
Virtual san has no concept of traditional storage volumes based on luns or nfs shares although the iscsi target service uses luns to enable an initiator on a remote host to transport block level data to a storage device in the virtual san cluster.
For additional overviews on object storage read our previous blog post in this series object storage vs file storage for a clearer side by side comparison of block storage vs object storage take a look at the table below.
Virtualized storage or vsan.
Object storage also referred to as object based storage is a general term that refers to the way in which we organize and work with units of storage called objects.
Initially the data persistence platform supports dell emc objectscale and object storage from cloudian and minio and datastax s apache casandra based database as a service.
Components is the disks of the vm which is vmdk.
When you provision a virtual machine on a virtual san datastore virtual san creates an object for each virtual disk.
Where virtual machine data is stored as an objects.
A software layer sits between the server usually a virtual machine providing an abstracted version of the underlying physical storage.
Object is comprised of multiple components.
Some standard storage protocols such as fcp do not apply to virtual san.
Another component is there which is witness which helps to avoid the split brain scenarios.
