Fake vSAN with Remote Storage? (Lab Purposes Only)

[barnette08]

So I've seen plenty of stuff out there where we can trick ESXi into thinking a spinning local drive is SSD.  However, what I'm looking for is to see if anyone has been able to trick ESXi into thinking it's iSCSI, FC, or NFS devices are locally attached, in order to run vSAN in a test lab.  I've seen the articles on nesting and have done that as well, but I need to try and do this with a physical server if I can.

I didn't see any options in the claim rule add commands and when using the GUI to 'Mark as Local' I just get a failure - cannot change the host configuration.  Any ideas would be helpful!

[daphnissov]

You can't do it with those storage types because they're always external. If you want vSAN in a lab, simply use nested instances with VMDKs to simulate the different disk types.

[barnette08]

Yep, I figured and I've done those before but I wanted to try with physical servers for a VCF use case I'm working with.