vSAN1

Hi - I have a slightly aging vSAN hardware setup:

4 nodes, two disk groups per node

3x Dell R720 Servers

1x.Dell R730 Server

I wish to add more drives for additional disk space but I am struggling to get the exact same drives that are currently in the R720 servers.

They currently have 1.2TB 6Gbps SAS drives and all I can get are 1.2TB 12Gbps SAS drives. They don't seem to make/sell the 6Gbps drives anymore and the ones that I have found are almost twice the price of the newer better drives :smileyconfused:

So my question is: Can I add the 12Gbps drives to my existing 6Gbps drives and move forward?

Hello Evan,

As always it is 'best practice' to use homogeneous hardware on each node if possible, but Yes it is supported to use mixed drive models in the same disk groups provided said drives are on the vSAN HCL. At the inter-disk-group level the main concern of using mixed disk models in the same disk-group would be the controllers driver/firmware not playing as well with one model of driver than the other, but if is same vendor and near-enough same family of model you should have no issues with this.

Realistically a capacity-tier drive is very unlikely to be saturated enough to use the full 6Gbps (let alone 12Gbps) so unlikely to perform better (and anyway even if it did, this would be negated by 'waiting' on the other slower disks)

Also bear in mind, that even if you just need say 1TB more space right now, you will need to add the same amount of space to each node (not necessarily each disk group if you have more than 1 disk-group per host, but again - having homogeneous disk-groups is best practice).

Bob

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Hi Bob - great answer, just what I needed!

Like you say, make sure its on the HCL!

And yes, I intend to buy 1 new drive for each of the disk groups (8 disk groups in total) which is why I am happy I don't need to try and source the more expensive and elusive 6Gbps drives anymore.

Nice one, thank you.