hmm, most of the information needs update and as you pointed out are not very clear.
VSAN support is from vsphere5.5U1 onwards. during vSphere5.5 it was in beta version . The questions mentioned here somewhat resembles Pre-GA mode
1, "Up to eight hosts can be in a cluster, not all of the hosts need to provide storage"
Q1: Can hosts not part of the cluster access the vSAN LUNs? (assuming they have access to the storage network)
A) What this statement is trying to say is that VSAN cluster limit is 8. (This limit was in beta time frame. In GA i remember the limit was bumped upto 32, probably someone else can correct me if am wrong here)
hosts can be part of the vsan cluster as compute resource ie not having any diskgroups. as long as minimum 3 hosts in the cluster are contributing for vsan storage.
>Can hosts not part of the cluster access the vSAN LUNs? (assuming they have access to the storage network)
A) Correct. The hosts needs to be part of VSAN cluster to access the storage. At datacenter level you can move VMs to and out of vsan clusters
2 "The requirements for VMware Virtual SAN start with a machine running VMware® vCenter ServerTM. This requirement is necessary for management because VMware® Virtual SANTM is fully integrated into vSphere."
Q2: Apart from the obvious requirement that vCS is required for vSAN configuration, does the vCS need to run on the actual vSAN cluster? That would be a really hard requirement IMO...
A) No hard requirement here. vCenter Server can reside within or outside the vSAN cluster
3, "Each VMware Virtual SAN cluster requires a dedicated network that each host can communicate with. The recommendation is for a 10 Gb network, preferably with a NIC team of 2 x 10 Gb NICs for fault tolerance purposes. Testing has shown that a 1 Gb network can work, but this size of network is not supported."
Q3: What size? and are 1Gb NICs for storage supported or not? The picture (not linked in this post) says yes.
A) 1GB NIC is supported. but recommendation is 10 Gb network. The requirement for 1G/10G should be based on vsan cluster design/sizing requirements (refer Cormac's VSAN Design and sizing guide )
4: "All hosts that have local storage must have at least one SSD. A host cannot have an HDD locally and participate in the VMware Virtual SAN cluster"
Q4: What is that one saying?
-Can I not use ESXi hosts in the vSAN booting from local HDD?
A) what this is saying is that at minimum you need 1 unused SSD and 1 unused HDD per host for VSAN consumption. you cannot use the same HDD which is used for ESXi installation.
In other words, you cannot share the same HDDs for VSAN and ESXi installations. The HDDs/SSDs should not have any used partitions
5, "You must have a minimum of three hosts running ESXi 5.5. Two of the hosts use the VMware Virtual SAN datastore and the third host provides availability"
Q5: What does that one mean?
A) we have to remove this one. i guess this was taken from pre-GA versions. this is no longer the case. you need minimum 3 hosts which are participating in vsan storage.
Thanks,
