vSphere 5 - Virtual Storage Appliance

In one of the comments to numerous blog articles I have been reading lately I noticed quite a sceptic opinion about vSphere 5 Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) with regard to its capabilities and price. That was quite motivating to spend a day on reading about VSA and making my own opinion about it..

So, here is a short overview of VSA from vSphere admin.

The main goal of VSA is to provide SMB companies with shared storage without buying physical NAS or SAN itself. Instead VSA will use internal storage of your ESXi hosts to create shared NFS storage that will be presented as a single entity to all hosts in your vSphere. This is how it looks with 3 node configuration.