Q: What is the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance?

A:Not every IT environment is large enough to need a SAN. Some businesses don't have the budget to afford one or the in-house experience to use oneeffectively. However, almost every environment that plans a move to virtualization also desires that move to include high availability for VMs.

This use case is one of the primary reasons for the release of VMware's vSphere Storage Appliance. This appliance is intended to be a collection ofeither two or three ESXi hosts that store their VMs within locally attached storage. Using built-in replication, VMs created atop one host areautomatically available atop other hosts as well. This replication enables VMware's high availability functionality to migrate VMs from a failed hostto a working host, without the need for shared storage on a SAN.