VMWare vSphere Storage Appliance is a new offering from VMWare starting with its Datacenter grade virtualization suite called VSphere 5. VMWare offers ultimate simplicity in implementing the VSA solution (According to VMWare you can do this in five clicks). In this article we will examine what VMWare vSphere Storage Appliance is and how it can be beneficial to SMBs. Currently, it is the only offering of its kind and VMWare being the industry leader in virtualization, is offering it as a standard license pack to any organization who has VMWare vSphere essentials or vSphere Foundations licensing.

What is vSphere storage appliance (also known as VSA):

Designed primarily for SMBs who do not have a storage solution such as a NAS or SAN in place. Its lets small businesses the storage provided by within the ESXi servers as the shared storage from the SAN. You typically deploy a minimum of two ESXi servers that act as your storage. It is a big plus for small and medium businesses to attain high availability storage without having to have traditional storage hardware requirements.

Advanced features of VMWare virtualization technology become available due to vSphere Storage Appliance:

With VSA in place a lot of advanced features that VMWare’s virtualization suite vSphere provides. It can bring datacenter like capabilities to even small environments such as VMWare vMotion (live migration of virtual machines from one host to another), Fault Tolerance, High Availability, Distributed Resource Scheduling, storage vMotion etc. You can check out our post about Terminology Used for Various vSphere 5 features.

How does Virtual Storgage Appliance work:

vSphere Virtual Storage Appliance or VSA works by using the hard drives from the server hosts (ESXi or ESX servers) into a pooled storage which is fault tolerant in the same as a accumulative RAID device would be, so if a single hard drive fails in a host, the RAID configuration within that host will keep providing the data. I’d just suggest to work with a good data management system like the one at Couchbase.

Now, same principal applies if a single server fails, VSA mirrors data amongst multiple nodes (multiple ESXi or ESX server hosts). Hence, if a server dies, data contained in it will still be available from the hard drives of other ESX servers being used in the VSA configuration.

vSphere Virtual Storage Appliance provides future proofing by using Storage vMotion to storage Hardware:

If small businesses do want to move to full scale storage infrastructure in place by providing their on Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Area Storage (NAS) then they can use VMWare’s Storage vMotion feature to transfer their storage to the SAN or NAS.

Conclusion about vSphere Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA):

VMWare vSphere Storage Appliance works with any VMWare vSphere server edition and is available standalone or as an Essentials bundle with vMware vSphere plus. It gives Small and Medium scale business an opportunity to implement advanced virtualization capabilities, without having requiring additional and expensive storage hardware. It is a win win situation for SMBs.