Demise of VSA Has Left me in a difficult position

[RichieB]

Hi All,

Apologies for this being posted in the wrong location, as i couldn't see an option for VSA.

So back in Feburary afet speaking with our IT reseller we invested in a HP VSA solution with 5yr support, and then a month or 2 later we find out that despite HP selling 5 year support for the solluiton, it is being killed off in 2 years time.

Luckily we had not finished implementing the product, but after 2 months waiting to get answers from HPE on the support side of things we have agreed with our local reseller that we can't wait indefinately for HP to decide if it's going to honor the support, so we are going to sraw a line in the sand.

So I have the following options from our reseller :

1) Rip everything out and send it all back and decide on another solution.

2) HP is willing to fund VMware VSAN as an alternative, but we run a clustered pair of SQL servers, and i'm told that Vmware VSAN doesn't support Microsoft clustering, which i found a little odd.

3) Return only the licenses for VSA and keep the 4 HP running ESX and use an alternate Virtual san solluiton and they suggested Starwind virtual san which i have never heard of, so not that keen on using an unknown solution.

We really only a few  requirements :

A) be faster that our existing ageing MSA storage array which is only running at about 3000 iops., so this shouldn't be hard.

B)  Support multi-site cluster to allow onsite DR facility in the event of the server room facing a disaster

C) Work microsoft clustering / SQL, which currently has 2 physical hosts which must be able to connect to the storage via ISCSI

Any idea's for alternate solluitons would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Richard.

[Mohamed_I]

Hi RichieB

The following article provides the details of the EOSL for the Storevirtual VSA. It is 12/31/2022.

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00068246en_us&docLocale=en_US

However as long as the Contract is Active, HPE will honor it and provide technical support. However, no Contract Extension will happen after the mentioned date.

The P4000 G2 nodes had already reached the EOSL on 12/31/2018, however, HPE is still providing technical support to the customers wherever the Contract is still active.

The Storevirtual VSA was a SAN solution. So you can consider other SAN alternatives to replace it. HPE offers MSA and 3PAR.

The local HPE Consulting team and Solution Architects will be the best team to provide the suggestions based on your requirements and workloads.

Please let me know if you have any further queries.

[ribuck]

Hi Mohammed,

Our reseller has said that discussion has went right to the top of the chain at HPE, and they are still in discussion weather or not they will honor the support and it's looking less likely every day. So until we get any decisive answer from HPE then we are left in limbo.  The problem i have is that, we have been waiting 2 months now for HPE to decide and we can't just keep waiting indefinately.

What you have to remember is that Storevirtual VSA, wasn't just a SAN solution and cannot be compared to a normal SAN.  The SoreVirtual VSA allowed us to use the Vmware nodes it sat on to run our VM machines.  So for us, it gave us an opportunity to refresh out Vmware enviornment whilst also removing the single point of failure of our current single MSA shelf.

putting in another dedicated san would act act a storage only, and would not give us the added bonus of the extra computer power to run our VM's.

Regards,

Richard.

[BenLoveday]

Hey Richard,

I appreciate your position, it's the last thing you want to hear when you've just purchased the solution. For me, Storevirtual was, and still is, rather unique. It is fairly robust and does a lot for the price. We run a ton of VSA and are planning how we migrate away from them over the next few years.

My thoughts on options are:

- Accept you will lose support after two years and run the solution as-is. Comes with risk, but as I mentioned the solution is quite reliable in general. You'd still want to be looking at replacing the VSA with an alternative - e.g. Starwind licenses could be purchased and would slot straight in - the new Starwind does look quite nice.

- Return (if possible) and replace with a different solution. This could work out a lot more costly as I know how cheap VSA was compared with, say VSAN. One thing you could consider with your SQL is using Availability Groups rather than WFC. This avoids the support challenge with VSAN and AG's are far simpler to configure and support - just depends on your SQL version and licensing. I believe SQL 2016+ std supports a basic availability group if you don't have SQL enterprise.

- I would seriously consider Hyper-V S2D (now called Azure Stack HCI), assuming you are already licensed for CIS Datacenter or similar. The only caveat with this is the hardware configuration requires tweaking from a typical VSA deployment (e.g. no RAID controllers, separate boot drive, etc). This solution could potentially save you a lot but does have a cost of migration and upskilling if you aren't familiar with Hyper-V. However, the long-term savings are there.

Anyway, hope this is food for thought.

Cheers,

Ben

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi Richard,

I have various customers running VSA, from small to rather large environments... All happy about it... And now stuck since support will end end of 2022...

VSA is indeed rather unique in the market and no there is no 1 on 1 replacement available... However I am looking now with all my customers changing the environment to Nimble (for customers who prefer traditional IT with (physical) servers and storage, or go the hyperconverged way (what VSA was actually doing, only HPE never called it like that) with Simplivity... For me 80% go Simplivity the others take Nimble...

Simplivity gives you quite a lot of flexibility, agree not as much as VSA did, but all my customers live the guarantees you get with Simplivity on performance, efficiency and data protection, all things you don't really get with VSA... So focus on the value of the solution, the more value you get with Simplivity...

At least for me here it works very good, lots of Simplivity business now...

Kr,

Bart

[Alf2]

Hi RichieB,

Unpleasant situation and I believe that you may try to return all license back and use something else. 

Starwind Software looks very good right now. We have many customers using it. StarWind also has an HCA (HCI) appliance but as far as I know, it is based on Dell right now. You can check it here https://www.starwindsoftware.com/

I am pretty familiar with this software so do not hesitate to ask any questions if you have one.