“Why do we have to listen to our hearts?” the boy asked, “Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”

– “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho

In pursuit of my dreams, I debut as an author.

A blurb about the book,

Title :  “Getting started with VSAN”

Build an optimal, high performance and resilient software defined storage on VSAN for your vSphere infrastructure

Objectives

• Effectively understand the fundamental concepts and features of Virtual SAN
• Implement and administer your VMware VSAN efficiently
• Ensure stability, data reliability and meet service level agreements for each virtual machine and application

Summary
Virtual SAN without any doubt is the latest fad in the Virtualization Arena. The concept has taken Datacenter Virtualization to the next level by moving the storage back from SAN to server hardware. The best part of VSAN solution is the fact that a near flash performance is achieved with only a marginal percentage of flash storage. And all this with hardly any compromise to the exquisite feature set of vSphere and interoperability with other product suite from VMware. This book helps in closely examining the capabilities as well the limits of VSAN in a sequential flow while explaining the fundamental aspects.

Description
This book covers the fundamental aspects of Software Defined storage, its evolution and its role in a Software-Defined Data Center. You will have a complete understanding of VMware Virtual SAN architecture, its components and how it is put together. Guidelines pertaining to sizing and profiling of Virtual Machines are also covered in detail.

The book explores your options in choosing the type of Virtual SAN and deploys a simple setup that would demonstrate to you the workflow of a VSAN deployment. You will review policy based management of storage and see how Storage Policy-Based Management modernizes storage provisioning and paves the way for being truly software defined.

After covering the anatomy of I/O-Input/Output to a VSAN datastore, some insight into design considerations and best practices of VSAN configuration, the book ends with a discussion on troubleshooting and how various utilities can be leveraged to diagnose common problems that surface on a Virtual SAN environment.

What you will learn

• Understand what Software Defined Storage is and how it is implemented through VMware Virtual SAN
• Install, Configure and Administer VSAN
• Architect VSAN to cater to the specific business requirements
• Define Storage Tiering at the software layer by implementing Storage Policy-Based Management
• Understand how every I/O flows through the VSAN infrastructure
• Monitor your VSAN Infrastructure to discover issues at an early stage
• Efficiently use utilities to troubleshoot and fix issues

Who this book is written for

This book is intended for Server Administrators and Storage Administrators who would like to successfully build and scale a VSAN backed vSphere infrastructure. Basic understanding of vSphere concepts and storage fundamentals will be helpful.

Style and approach

A simple step-by-step guide to walk you in-depth through software defined storage and virtual VSAN. Each chapter is written keeping in mind that the audience are not particularly storage experts rather server administrators.

Where can you get it

The book is available @
https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/getting-started-vmware-virtual-san

Do feel free to write to me with your feedback at cedric.rajendran@gmail.com

Cheers !!!