Why do customers new to virtualization need to have a SAN?

Business size category is not a technical driver for SAN adoption; the need is determined by workload requirements such as shared storage for HA, not by company classification.

Competitor purchasing decisions are not a valid technical justification for infrastructure investment; a SAN should be acquired based on specific functional requirements.

While a SAN can consolidate storage resources, simplified storage management alone does not justify a SAN for virtualization - shared storage enabling HA and DR is the defining technical requirement.

Virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V depend on shared storage - provided by a SAN - to enable HA features like vMotion, live migration, and host-level failover clustering. Without centralized shared storage, virtual machines cannot be migrated between hypervisor hosts or restarted on alternate hosts when a failure occurs. DR and HA capabilities are the primary technical justification for deploying a SAN in a virtualized environment.