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Our hands-on testing compared the following VMware vSAN clusters:
We also tested a legacy vSAN cluster equipped with three five-year-old dual-socket HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9 servers powered by Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 processors.
For our legacy baseline cluster, we chose the Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 12-core processor as a common processor for a 5-year-old server of that generation. For the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 cluster, we chose the Intel Xeon Gold 6240 18-core processor following the published vSAN ReadyNode AF-6 all-NVMe configuration.3 This configuration gives the HPE cluster 36 cores per server. The Dell EMC PowerEdge R7515 cluster configuration uses the AMD EPYC 7502p 32- core processor and hardware that is certified for vSAN on the VMware Compatibility Guide.4 The 2nd generation AMD EPYC processor line does not include a 36-core option. So for our comparison, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7515 cluster had 32 cores per server while the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 cluster had 36 cores per server.
We analyzed the costs of the two current-generation clusters using list pricing for hardware and four-year licensing and support for the following software products: Microsoft Windows Server® 2019 Datacenter, Microsoft SQL Server® 2017 Enterprise, VMware vSphere™ 6.7 U3 Enterprise Plus, and VMware vSAN Enterprise.
We measured the transactional database performance of the clusters using Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and the DVD Store 3 benchmark, which targets a transactional database and produces a metric of orders per minute.
Finally, we compared the price and performance of each solution by calculating a price-to-performance ratio.
1 Pricing for the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7515 came in an August 30, 2019 quote we received from Dell EMC.
2 Pricing for HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 came in a July 16, 2019 quote we received from PCM.com.
3 VMware Compatibility Guide, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=vsan&productid=45383&deviceCat- egory=vsan&details=1&vsan_type=vsanreadynode&vsan_partner=515&vsan_generation=4&vsan_workload_pro- files=AF-6%20Series&page=1&display_interval=10&sortColumn=Partner&sortOrder=Asc.
4 “VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search,” accessed January 29, 2020, https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php.