Thinking about implementing VMware, Inc.’s Virtual SAN? During a panel at VMworld 2015, panelists offered some real-life experience from customers who’ve been using Virtual SAN (VSAN) for a year: Kenny Wilder, director of infrastructure at Fulton County Schools; Tod Huber, director of information technology at Master Lock Company LLC; and Chris Skaling, regional practice manager at FusionStorm, Inc.

The men spoke with Stu Miniman, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

Needed changes to virtualization

The panel began by talking about why they made the switch to VSAN.

“’We were moving toward a hub-and-spokes strategy for our locations,” Huber said. “We had servers in every location, and that wasn’t feasible anymore.”

For Wilder, his school was facing replacing the hardware for its student information system. “So I put my reputation on the line and went ahead and purchased a three-node cluster, scaled on the server,” Wilder said. “And I ran some tests, and I proved to them that it would run fast enough.”

Smooth implementation of VSAN

From the operational standpoint, things ran pretty smoothly. “I ran the project with a couple of engineers — mainly network side and server side,” said Huber. There was no storage team in place at Master Lock, so it was three employees doing the implementation perspective. “We needed to scope it and scale it for the offices we had.”

Wilder said that that the VSAN implementation started off with one three-node and has now evolved to three clusters. “It’s allowing me to buy all this hardware with the same staff without hiring any more,” he noted.

Selling points to new customers

From a selling perspective, Skaling noted that his company designed a catalogue to help customers decide what they might need. “We basically custom-designed three sets of nodes,” Skaling said.

It also helped to communicate the cost savings after implementing the new technology for the long term. “You’re going to save on administration costs, because you’re not hiring anyone new.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE