VMware has significantly lowered the minimum hardware requirements for its virtual storage arrays based on vSAN. Previously, an analysis of telemetry data from thousands of vSAN clusters in production had shown that the previous recommendations were set too high. The hardware guidelines were previously based on synthetic tests under extreme conditions rather than real workloads.
The new specifications for ReadyNodes—the storage servers in virtual arrays—provide for up to 67 percent less RAM for vSAN storage clusters. For CPU cores, there is a reduction of up to 33 percent for vSAN storage clusters. For vSAN HCI clusters (Hyperconverged Infrastructure), RAM requirements decrease by up to 50 percent. Product Marketing Engineer Pete Koehler admits in the announcement that VMware analyzed telemetry data from thousands of vSAN clusters with various production workloads and found: “vSAN clusters use significantly less RAM than expected” and…
