How do I configure vSAN?

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How do I configure vSAN?

Procedure

  1. Navigate to an existing host cluster.
  2. Click the Configure tab.
  3. Under vSAN, select Services.
  4. Click Configure vSAN to open the Configure vSAN wizard.
  5. Select the type of vSAN cluster to configure, and click Next.
  6. Configure the vSAN services to use, and click Next.
  7. Claim disks for the vSAN cluster, and click Next.

What are the different configuration options for vSAN?

VMware provides two different configuration options for vSAN—All-Flash and Hybrid. The All-Flash configuration uses flash devices for both the cache layer and the capacity layer.

How do I check my vSAN RAID configuration?

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the Virtual SAN cluster in the vSphere Web Client.
  2. Click the Configuration tab.
  3. Under vSAN, click Configuration Assist to review the Virtual SAN configuration categories.
  4. Select an individual configuration check and review the detailed information at the bottom of the page.

How do I know if vSAN is enabled?

Enabling vSAN

  1. Open the vSphere Web Client.
  2. Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
  3. Select the cluster on which you want to enable vSAN.
  4. Click the Manage tab.
  5. Click Settings.
  6. Under Virtual SAN, select General and click Edit.
  7. Select the mode for storage disks to be claimed. The options are:
  8. Click OK.

How do I access vSAN storage?

Use the vSAN file service to create file shares in the vSAN datastore that client workstations or VMs can access. The data stored in a file share can be accessed from any device that has access rights. vSAN File Service is a layer that sits on top of vSAN to provide file shares.

What RAID level does vSAN use?

RAID 5 or RAID 6 erasure coding enables vSAN to tolerate the failure of up to two capacity devices in the datastore. You can configure RAID 5 on all-flash clusters with four or more fault domains. You can configure RAID 5 or RAID 6 on all-flash clusters with six or more fault domains.

Why vSAN is required?

VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is a hypervisor-converged storage solution for your vSphere environment. It was built to be extremely easy to use and administrator, high performance and expandable. In this post I will go over the requirements and how to prepare your environment for VSAN.

What protocol is vSAN?

What storage protocols does vSAN support? E.g. iSCSI, NFS, etc. As vSAN only communicates with vSphere virtual machines, there’s really no need for a standard storage protocol. vSAN uses a proprietary protocol within the cluster that’s more efficient than the familiar choices.

Does vSAN need DNS?

Static IP and DNS records—You’ll need to create forward and reverse DNS records for the vSAN file services nodes. A static IP address, subnet masks, and a gateway for file servers are also needed.

Does vSAN need RAID?

Yes that’s correct – vSAN does not use hardware RAID, instead the data is protected at the software layer. vSAN uses a concept of disk groups with a minimum of one disk group required per host. A disk group can contain up to seven capacity devices and one cache device.

What is vSAN 2 node cluster?

A two-node vSAN cluster has two hosts at the same location. The witness function is performed at a second site on a dedicated virtual appliance. Two-node vSAN clusters are often used for remote office/branch office environments, typically running a small number of workloads that require high availability.

How many hosts do you need for vSAN?

three hosts
A standard vSAN cluster must contain a minimum of three hosts that contribute capacity to the cluster. A two host vSAN cluster consists of two data hosts and an external witness host.

What is the difference between RAID 1 and 6?

RAID 1 of a pair of drives is easy to do, but only 50% usable space. RAID 6 of a handful of drives will survive 2 failures, very slightly slower due to parity calculations. RAID 10 is striped RAID 1, can survive at least 1 failure, and is quite fast, but 50% usable capacity may be too expensive compared to RAID 6.

How much RAM does vSAN need?

Memory. The memory requirements for vSAN depend on the number of disk groups and devices that the ESXi hypervisor must manage. Each host must contain a minimum of 32 GB of memory to accommodate the maximum number of disk groups (5) and maximum number of capacity devices per disk group (7).

What is vmfs3 and vmfs5?

VMFS 5 is available as part of vSphere 5. VMFS 5 is introduced with lot of performance enhancements. Newly installed ESXi 5 will be formatted with VMFS 5 version but if you have upgraded the ESX 4 or ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5, then datastore version will be VMFS 3 only.