Working with vSAN

When i heard about VSAN I found this interesting and started learning about it and some best case’s for implementing the VSAN.

VMware is following SDDC model and one of the component is storage. In the latest vSphere 5.5 VMware has announced a new product called Virtual SAN (VSAN) which is in public beta now. VSAN is software based distributed storage solution and it is completely different from VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance). The VSAN is integrated with vSphere and there is no need to install any other appliance to use this product.


Configuration of VSAN is simple and it is similar to enabling HA and DRS Cluster.

VSAN Requirements:·vSphere 5.5 ( Windows and vCenter Appliance both supported)

• Minimum of 3 ESXi hosts
• Minimum 1 HDD and 1 SSD
• 1GB NICs on each host (10GB Recommended)
• VMkernel Network Enabled for VSAN
• Both VMWare Standard Switch and vDistributed Switch are supported

Capabilities of VSAN:·Number of Failures to Tolerate

• Flash Read Cache Reservation
• Object Space Reservation
• Force Provisioning
• Number of Disk Stripes per Object

LAB Requirement: for a best understanding, I recommend to use 3 Physical computers with 1 GB Nic’s each and SSD but you know you can run VMware vSAN without SSD disks also.

Run VMware vSAN without SSDs : you need to tell ESXi to emulate SSD disks. in order to do this, log onto each of your ESXi hosts using SSH and run the following commands:

1. esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -satp VMW_SATP_LOCAL -device mpx.vmhba2:C0:T0:L0 -option “enable_local enable_ssd”
2. esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -satp VMW_SATP_LOCAL -device mpx.vmhba3:C0:T0:L0 -option “enable_local”
3. esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d mpx.vmhba2:C0:T0:L0
4. esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d mpx.vmhba3:C0:T0:L0

This will enable ESXi to see it’s local hard disks (with the exception of the ESXi system drive) as SSD disks and enable you to run VMware vSAN without SSD disks 

Search Post

Label :