VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) Fundamentals

Overview – VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) Fundamentals
Hello and welcome to Pluralsight. You're watching VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) Fundamentals Overview. I'm your instructor, David Davis. One of the most common questions about any of the courses at Pluralsight. com is who should watch this course? To answer that question I would say that this course is great for anyone with VMware or vSphere experience. That could include VMware certified professionals, those with more advanced experience such VMware certified advanced professionals in either data center design or data center administration. It might actually include those who don't have a lot of vSphere experience such as traditional storage admins who are used to administering storage area network and network attached storage hardware in the datacenter. And by the way, for those storage admins I think you'll find VMware VSAN is going to be an excellent option. On the other hand, this course is also great for really anyone with just traditional server administration who wants to learn how VSAN could help their company. Still, I would recommend before you implement VSAN that you gain some hands-on vSphere administration experience such as my Pluralsight installing, configuring, and managing VMware vSphere course. So really to sum it up, I would say anyone out there who is interested in VMware, VMware vSphere, and VMware's hottest and latest storage product, VMware Virtual SAN, to watch this course where I'll be covering VMware Virtual SAN fundamentals.

Running Virtual SAN (VSAN) in a Lab
Hello and welcome to Pluralsight. You're watching, Running Virtual SAN or VSAN in a Lab Environment. The first question I want to answer is why would you want to run VSAN in a lab? After all, VSAN is meant for a production environment. Well, there are a number of different reasons, the first one being testing. You want to learn about VSAN? You want to put it to the test in your own environment with, let's say, cloned virtual machines of your production applications. Why not put it into a lab environment and make sure that it works, not just on the surface, but with your own applications and gain some comfort level with it, right? The other reason to put VSAN in a lab is for learning purposes. VSAN is a hot new storage product and many people want to learn about it, so putting VSAN into a lab is a great way to do it. You'll get first-hand knowledge and again you'll gain a comfort level by putting it in and configuring it for yourself. The third reason here is for development. There are many companies out there that are many VSAN compatible solutions so why not put VSAN put into a lab environment so that you can test out your management application, backup application, or other plug-ins that you want to be VSAN compatible. And then finally, let's say that you have gained a comfort level with VSAN and you want to put it in production, creating a lab environment that's a proof of concept based on your real production infrastructure is the best way to do it. With a POC you'll take clones of your production virtual machines, run them in the lab, and perhaps add some amount of stress or load onto the applications and the VSAN infrastructure to ensure that it's going to meet your needs.