News

New Option in Storage: VMware's vSAN Debuts

Virtual SAN pricing, editions now available and comes with Virtual Distributed Switch.

• By Michael Domingo
• 03/12/2014

The long-anticipated software-defined storage solution from VMware officially debuted today, pretty much without fanfare, as the product has been in visible and transparent development since it was announced at last year's VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

With the beta testing having ended officially with today's general release of Virtual SAN, all that has been unknown up until today is the pricing and editions available. At retail, VMware vSAN Standalone is $2,495 per processor, and there is also a vSAN for Desktop version aimed at those who want to use it in a VDI scenario, priced at $50 per user.

In a phone briefing, VMware's director of product marketing for storage and availability Alberto Farronato explained that VMware's bare-bones licensing was aimed at making "it as simple as possible for our customers who use vSphere to license vSAN without any complex licensing model. You count the virtual CPUs in your thin cluster, and that's all you really need to do." He also said that that version of the product doesn't skimp on features, as that version has "no restrictions on capacity or performance or feature limitations." He said it includes persistent datastore capabilities, read-write caching, policy-based management, all the data services through vSphere, and other features.

Farronato also said that the vSphere Virtual Distributed Switch is also included in the standalone version, which is typically a feature that is licensed as part of vSphere Enterprise Plus. "We wanted to make sure that any customer deploying the vSAN will be able to take advantage of the Virtual Distributed Switch regardless of the underlying vSphere edition."

To promote vSAN, VMware is offering a bundled version of vSAN with vSphere Data Protection Advanced for $2,895, and a promotion of 20 percent off retail for those who want to upgrade from vSphere Storage Appliance.

For more information, also read "What's New in vSphere 5.5: Configs, The Web Client, vSANs" and "Certified for vSAN: Ecosystem Buillding Around VMware Storage."