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M4T
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Starting a 16 Host vSAN

Hi community,

for it to setup easy what's the best way to set up a 16 host all flash vSAN.

the setup would be

16x HPE BL460c Gen8 Blades

32x 240GB SSD 2x on each Blade

2x 10GB Connections on each blade.

what's the best practise for me to set it up easily.

I have installed Esxi 6.7u1 on all 16 blades i fresh installed and added the two SSD on each one and not created a datastore with them. do I need to set anything else up first before I use the quick start setup. do I need to have vSphere HA enabled or any others options?

matto

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TheBobkin
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Hello Matto,

The only pre-requirements for Quickstart are 6.0 U2 or higher ESXi build and no existing vSAN or networking configuration (as if you have a vmk for iSCSI/FT etc. it will remove them).

Quickstart won't apply licensing for vSAN so apply this yourself.

"32x 240GB SSD 2x on each Blade

added the two SSD on each one and not created a datastore with them."

I have some concerns about this configuration - it is extremely limited in space per node as you would need to use one SSD for cache and one SSD for capacity to create a Disk-Group in each node meaning you will only have 240GB (before small vSAN overhead) capacity in each node. Total this will be less than 2TB usable space for vmdks in the cluster (using RAID1,FTT=1).

These drives are also below the default CLOM component max size (255GB) so you would have to change this parameter in order to avoid component placement issues:

VMware Knowledge Base

(and no this is not ignorable because you are using SSDs and the kb says 'magnetic disks', that is irrelevant and I will get that kb changed)

The SSDs are on the vSAN HCL for 6.7 and rated for cache-tier?

Bob

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daphnissov
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The quick start wizard will walk you through all that.

TheBobkin
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Hello Matto,

The only pre-requirements for Quickstart are 6.0 U2 or higher ESXi build and no existing vSAN or networking configuration (as if you have a vmk for iSCSI/FT etc. it will remove them).

Quickstart won't apply licensing for vSAN so apply this yourself.

"32x 240GB SSD 2x on each Blade

added the two SSD on each one and not created a datastore with them."

I have some concerns about this configuration - it is extremely limited in space per node as you would need to use one SSD for cache and one SSD for capacity to create a Disk-Group in each node meaning you will only have 240GB (before small vSAN overhead) capacity in each node. Total this will be less than 2TB usable space for vmdks in the cluster (using RAID1,FTT=1).

These drives are also below the default CLOM component max size (255GB) so you would have to change this parameter in order to avoid component placement issues:

VMware Knowledge Base

(and no this is not ignorable because you are using SSDs and the kb says 'magnetic disks', that is irrelevant and I will get that kb changed)

The SSDs are on the vSAN HCL for 6.7 and rated for cache-tier?

Bob

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