There has been a ton of content available on VSAN from sources like blogs, videos, KB articles, etc. but surprisingly there have been very few technical papers (none?) from VMware on VSAN unless you want to count the What’s New in VMware VSAN paper that VMware published back in February. Well VMware has just ended their VSAN technical paper drought with a new one entitled “Understanding Data Locality in VMware Virtual SAN“. What is Data Locality you might ask, according to the paper it is:
“In computer science, “data locality”, also known, as ”locality of reference” is the behavior of computer programs according to which a workload accesses a set of data entities or storage locations within some period of time with a predictable access pattern.”
With VSAN what this means is how VSAN makes effective use of it’s caching mechanism. The paper mainly explains how read caching works in VSAN and how you can also combine it with the Content-Based Read Cache that caches from RAM which works with VMware Horizon View. I always like deep dives on technology and this paper gives you a real good understanding of one of VSAN’s best features.
Once you finish reading the paper if you are thirsting for even more VSAN knowledge be sure to check out Duncan & Cormac’s new VSAN book which is available in the Kindle edition today and in paperback form in a month.
