local storage with ESXi

[khaliqamar]

hello,

I have around 2-4TB drives available with each of mine 4 nodes. We bought it for vsan but that project never finish because of vsan price and some other problems.

is there any free software available in the market with the similar  capabilities as vsan or any other idea i can build that local storage as a shared storage.

Regards

[vembutech1]

Try FreeNAS, a Opensource Stroage OS with lots of features and plugins. Well supported by ESXi and can be usable for shared block storage. Supports both NFS and iSCSI protocol.

[NetxRunner]

You can use StarWind Free Software Defined Storage for the HCI • StarWind Virtual SAN ® Free  which does almost the same as VMware vSAN combining your directly attached storage into a single highly available storage pool. Here is the guide that helped me a lot in a similar case as yours: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-hyper-converged-2-node-cluster-vmware-vsphere​

[ftbug]

Starwind seems like a great free product to utilise vsan. They have plenty of helpful walkthroughs etc too Software Defined Storage for the HCI • StarWind Virtual SAN ® Free

[Finikiez]

You can also have a look on Nutanix CE

Nutanix Community Edition – no hardware, no setup, no cost

[khaliqamar]

startwind is a good option but  after 30-days period their GUI will stop working and then you have to work with the power-shell.

I will check Nutanix.