Connecting vSAN Nodes to SAN

[muhammadusmana]

We are looking for a possibility to connect vSAN running nodes to external SAN.

Is there a possibility to connect the vSAN hosts having FC HBA adapters installed to connect to SAN Fabric?

Also is it possible to connect the vSAN hosts using Software iSCSI to connect to an iSCSI SAN?

[depping]

Sure, you can use FC HBA's or iSCSI to connect to external storage. vSAN supports this, note vSAN itself will the normal vSAN network.

[chris122686]

To connect / migrate the virtual machines from iSCSI/FC/NFS to vSAN if they are on different cluster:

Note: Please take care of CPU affinity rules and resource pools and proceed with the below plan of action.

- Present current SAN storage to new ESXi vSAN Hosts.

- Shutdown virtual machine and remove it from Inventory on old cluster.

- Re-register the virtual machine on a new vSAN host cluster.

- Using storage vMotion migrate the VMs to vSAN.

- After migrating all virtual machines, un-present vSAN LUN's.

Please mark this as correct if this answers and helps you .

[praveenlua1]

Does the support for this functionality requires any specific edition of vSAN or all the vSAN edition supports this functionality. Kindly clarify 

[depping]

Any ESXi host can be connected to a SAN, this has nothing to do with vSAN and is indeed supported by all versions.

[gordonng]

The vSAN license is only for vSAN capabilities (using local storage as a SAN).

You can always connect your hosts to FC or iSCSI SAN as additional storage solution / datastore, this is separate from vSAN feature.