Hello all,
I've been tasked by our director to take our existing 5 node vSAN cluster and stretch it to our new data center. We are purchasing 5 new identical hosts to place at the secondary site. I've doing research and while I can find lots of resources for deploying a vSAN stretched cluster (greenfield) and converting a stretched cluster back to a standard cluster. I find little documentation on how to take an existing standard cluster and stretching it. While I am familiar with all the concepts, site affinity, fault domains, etc. I am struggling to picture the actual deployment process.
From what I can see, seems like the process is to add the new hosts to the existing standard vSAN cluster, then stretching it. However, this seems a bit counter productive in my opinion. As soon as the new hosts are added to the existing standard cluster, the VM vSAN objects are going to get distributed across all 10 nodes (the existing ones plus the new ones). Then once you stretch the cluster the objects will get distributed again based on site affinity. It seems to me that ideally, there should be a way to add the 5 new hosts and bypass the initial (and temporary) distribution of vSAN objects across all 10 nodes.
If adding the hosts to the existing cluster and then stretching it is the only way to do it, I am OK with it. I just want to make sure I am not missing something here. If the new hosts have to be added to the existing cluster before stretching it, is the assumption to wait until all syncing is done before stretching it?
Thanks in advance! Any feedback is much appreciated!
