How aSAN Virtual Storage Works & Disk Sizing Guide
  

George Fady Lv1Posted 2026-May-29 09:21

Sangfor's distributed storage solution — called aSAN — is one of the most critical components of HCI. Many engineers struggle with disk sizing, choosing the right disk type, and understanding data copies. This post covers everything you need.

1. What is aSAN?
aSAN (Sangfor Virtual Storage / Distributed Storage) integrates the local disks of all cluster nodes into a single unified virtual storage pool. VMs store their disk files in this pool and can access storage from any node.
  • Built on Distributed File System (DFS) architecture — similar in structure to RAID-10 with multiple copies and data striping.
  • Requires aSAN license to be activated.
  • Minimum 2 nodes to build aSAN.
  • Provides NFS/iSCSI storage interfaces to the upper layer.



2. Data Copy Strategy

Cluster Size
Copies
Behavior
2 nodes
2 copies
Each block is stored on both nodes — full redundancy if 1 node fails
3+ nodes
2 or 3 copies
3-copy mode available from v6.0.1 for higher resilience


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Sangfor Jojo Lv5Posted 2026-May-29 16:49
  
Nice sharing.
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