In this section, we'll discuss about the advantages of leveraging VSAN and its key differentiators.

Imagine a large environment with a heterogeneous cluster of storage provisioned from different arrays through iSCSI/FC/NFS. An administrator has to be skilled and knowledgeable in building and maintaining all of the components or, as in most cases, will have to depend on storage, network administrators, and various other teams and vendors to build and maintain such a setup.

Furthermore, beyond building and maintaining such a setup, the excruciating aspect would be when something breaks down in the environment, a true "needle in a haystack" situation. The complexity results in prolonged outages and multivendor coordination, and the root cause can be anything between an administrator tripping a cable and a software or hardware defect.

Now, compare this with only needing to worry about a set of hyper-converged x86 servers, just like the old just like old times, to build standalone...