Is it possible to use commercial SSD in a vSAN LAB enviroment, even tough the SSD is not listed in the vmware compatibility guide. And what SSDs would you then recommend on a budget.
Hi Littletown92,
The component certification listed under the vSAN VCG, provides you with support for the solution, and adequate endurance and performance; depending on what devices were selected. For a lab environment where you only want to test vSAN, you can use other (cheaper) components. Just don't expect great performance, and you may also see some alerts in regards to components not being on the VCG. I have a couple of home labs using Intel NUCs, and those components are certainly not on the VCG, but allows me to test versions of vSAN, and other products as well. Those devices work just fine. If it breaks, it is up to me to fix it.
The better SSDs you can afford, the better performance and endurance you will get. I run some VMs for my IP cameras on my home lab, so I did invest on more expensive (but still cheap) SSDs. It's a matter of what you can afford. I started with 2 nodes, and then expanded, as I was able to get more nodes later on.
Another option is to build a nested lab. This minimizes on the amount of hardware you need, but if a device fails, the entire cluster suffers.
Hi Littletown92,
The component certification listed under the vSAN VCG, provides you with support for the solution, and adequate endurance and performance; depending on what devices were selected. For a lab environment where you only want to test vSAN, you can use other (cheaper) components. Just don't expect great performance, and you may also see some alerts in regards to components not being on the VCG. I have a couple of home labs using Intel NUCs, and those components are certainly not on the VCG, but allows me to test versions of vSAN, and other products as well. Those devices work just fine. If it breaks, it is up to me to fix it.
The better SSDs you can afford, the better performance and endurance you will get. I run some VMs for my IP cameras on my home lab, so I did invest on more expensive (but still cheap) SSDs. It's a matter of what you can afford. I started with 2 nodes, and then expanded, as I was able to get more nodes later on.
Another option is to build a nested lab. This minimizes on the amount of hardware you need, but if a device fails, the entire cluster suffers.
SSD Selection Requirements
Table 1: SSD/Flash Endurance Requirements
SSD/Flash Device Use Case | JEDEC Endurance Requirement | Workload Charectization | Notes |
Host Swap Cache | 365 TBW or better | Random, infrequent writes | Host memory rarely overcommitted |
3650 TBW or better | Random, frequent writes | Host memory routinely overcommitted | |
Regular Datastore | 3650 TBW or better1 | Virtual Machine workload dependent | Size >= 1TB needs more endurance |
vSphere Flash Read Cache (VFlash) | 365 TBW or better | Virtual Machine workload dependent | Size <= 4TB |
ESXi Boot Device | 0.5 TBW minimum2 2 TBW recommended2,6 | Sequential (WAF <10)</td> | Size >= 4GB3 |
ESXi Coredump Device | 0.1 TBW minimum2,4 | Extremely sequential (WAF ~1) | Size >= 4GB3,4 |
ESXi Logging Device | 64 TBW (dedicated device) 128 TBW (colocated) 2,5 | Sequential7 (WAF < 100 block mode, WAF < 10 page mode)</td> | Size >= 4GB2,3 |