Financial and Operational Impact of VMware vSAN ESA vs. External Fibre Channel Storage
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Jonathan Fellows
A 5 year cost of ownership analysis between VMware vSAN ESA and external Fibre Channel SAN storage in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 environments.
Signal65 was asked to compare two storage approaches commonly deployed in VMware environments, VMware vSAN ESA and an external Fibre Channel SAN. Both were evaluated in the same test infrastructure across two environment sizes, measuring administrative time for common tasks and modeling five-year capital cost at list pricing. The two environments are intentionally different sizes, chosen to represent realistic mid-market and large enterprise deployments respectively. The Standard environment models a single site with 12 hosts in 3 clusters, 600 virtual machines, and 150 TB of raw storage, while the Expanded environment models two sites with 64 hosts in 8 clusters, 6,400 virtual machines, and 2,148 TB of raw storage.
Combined five-year cost of ownership, capital and operational:
- vSAN costs 13.5% and 39.5% less over five years vSAN lowers the five-year total by 13.5% in the Standard environment ($2,398,369 against $2,772,410) and by 39.5% in the Expanded environment ($18,745,389 against $30,965,048).
- Capital cost: vSAN carried the lower five-year capital cost in both environments, 13.5% lower in the Standard environment and 39.5% lower in the Expanded environment, at list pricing and equal raw capacity. Sourcing vSAN hosts through build-to-order channels, an option with no equivalent for an external array, widens that to 37.6% and 61.8%.
- Operational cost: vSAN required less administrative time in both environments and did not require a separately designated storage administrator for the modeled tasks, lowering operational cost by 13% in the Standard environment and 36% in the Expanded environment over five years.
Research commissioned by:
