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RaymundoEC
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

vSAN on Nested ESXI nt able to create the VSAN cluster

Hi there guys,

so I have this scenario, a Physical server with ESXi 7.0 on it, from there I was able to create a bunch of things like AD, etc, so I create 8 ESXi hosts (vESXi) so from there I checked Scsi channels and marked one tiny disk of 60GB as SSD everything fine so the problem comes when I try to create a vSAN cluster it fails so, just to confirm I wonder if anyone can share the correct steps to configure the disks on the vESXi or the correct way to virtualize the ESXi on top of the ESXi so to consider to change most probably I'm missing something there.

Ps. I'm not looking for a solution to my error since I tried one OVF templates from William Lamb for nested ESXi but my problem is the vCenter 7 I have not enough room to create it on top of the ESXi since this will be on top of those servers anyway I checked by making deployment of the vESXi on fusion for mac and everything seem like normal on the config, so I did the same on the physical host (on top of the ESXi ) and this fails.

thanks in advance again.

+vRay
4 Replies
a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

I'd really like to help, but I'm confused. You say that you are not looking for a solution for the errors, so what exactly is it you are asking for?

In case it's just the vCSA deployment, please provide some details, about the steps you took, and the issue you are facing.

André

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RaymundoEC
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

ya man,

like the correct way to virtualized or gotchas or something like that that can check and compare with my vESXi's or something in the config to compare in the physical ESXi host or something to check it up to see my fault.

Solutions will emerge eventually but I need to just to stick to the config to get it up and running to be able to create the vsan node and everything for VAN to work nested since this is just the top of a bunch of things to test on top of it.

thanks for your kind response.

+vRay
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TheBobkin
Champion
Champion

Hello Raymundo,

The main 'gotcha' I have noted from nested vSAN labs (and specifically when adding/creating Disk-Groups) is not providing sufficient memory to the hosts to do so.

I did notice as well in 7.0 vs previous versions that it is way stricter on this - in older versions you might get away with the bare minimum (provided the DGs are tiny) but in 7.0 if providing the same amount of available memory run into either not being able to create DGs or have them drop off or fail to mount on boot etc.:

VMware Knowledge Base

Bob

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srodenburg
Expert
Expert

I noticed that when I gave nested ESXi servers only 8 GB of ram, they would boot but vSAN would not work. When I gave them 10GB, it started working. The disk-groups where very small but vSAN does consume memory obviously as Bob stated.

In reality, to actually host a couple of small VM's on those nested vSAN nodes, I had to give them 12GB of RAM.