Recently a client ask about seeing a demonstration of VMware vSphere Storage Appliance in action. I didn’t have a live production or development to demo this setup on however, luckily there is a offline demo tool available direct through VMware to assist with this task.
Using the VSA 5.1 Offline Demo you can go through the process of setting up a VSA cluster and getting a general overview of how the process works. Further documentation on the vSphere Storage Appliance overview is available on VMware’s website here and it gives some great examples how how you could use VSA’s in a production environment.
In addition some considerations to take into place are the following:
vSphere 5.1 availability guide
VSA Appliance Deep Dive
Are you presently using the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance?