Yes, Virtual SAN (VSAN) can be supported on blade servers. VSAN will predominantly be deployed on rack mount servers but I continue to run into customers that are blade shops and they want to take advantage of VSAN.
Option 1
Without going into detail about specific vendors and their hardware options, many blade server vendors support 2 or more SFF SAS/SATA/SSD in their blades. Make one of those an SSD and the other a SAS/SATA and you are good to go for VSAN. Put at least 3 blades configured like this or up to 8 (max for VSAN Beta) into a VSAN enabled cluster.
Option 2
Take 3 rack mount servers and install at least 1 SSD and 1 HDD in each or up to 5 SSD and 30 HDDs (max for VSAN Beta). Put these 3 rack mount servers and up to 5 blade servers (with or without disks) into a VSAN enabled cluster for a total of up to 8 hosts (max for VSAN Beta) into a VSAN enabled cluster.
I have also been asked several times if VSAN will support JBOD that could be connected to blades. For the Beta, the answer is no but the VSAN Beta program customer feedback is being taken seriously and product roadmaps will be set accordingly. So the best recommendation is to sign up for the VSAN Beta (http://vsanbeta.com/) if you haven’t already, give VSAN a try, and get active on the VSAN Beta community by doing the following:
- Register for a My VMware account here (If you already have one skip to the next step)
- Sign the terms of use here (one time only)
- Access the VMware Virtual-SAN Beta community website.
Feel free to leave comments about any other interesting ways to deploy VSAN and use cases for it.
Live Virtually 