Creating vSAN

[M1nd3]

Hello everyone, i having little trouble creating vSAN. When i come to the point in vsphere client where i need to add physical drives to vSAN it doesn't show any. Basically none are available. So I have three DELL EMC machines and each only has single hard disk. I installed ESXi 7 on each of them, and on one of them i installed vCenter Server as well. Allocated 50 GB from each and created virtual machine to install windows server 2019 on each machine. ( Though i don't think this has impact on it)Now when i access ESXi 7 web interfaces on each i can see 1 datastore of nearly 1 TB capacity and they all VMFS6 type. So is it possible some how to create SSD and HDD disks required for vSAN from those datastores, or do i have to buy separate hard disks for each machine to be able to create vSAN? Thank you for you time and help.

Kind Regards

Mindaugas,

[fabio1975 · Accepted solution]

Ciao

You must purchase additional disks for both the cache (at least one SSD ) and the capacitive part (at least one SSD o HDD)

this link has the details of the requirements

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vsan-planning.doc/GUID-4B738A10-450...

https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2019/04/18/vsan-disk-groups/

[gck303]

Don't install ESXi on a HDD. Use a USB or flash drive, if the server will support one. Certainly a Dell r730 and a similar HP DL380 has a nice SD flash arrangement. 

You assign entire physical disks to the VSAN, not fractions  or partitions of a physical disk.