VSAN use two drive RAID1 for capacity drives on non-HBA mode controller

[MikeOD]

I have some questions about setting VSAN on a non-passthrough controller.

I'm setting up a VSAN on three HP DL360 G8 servers.  This will primarily be for a management cluster at our secondary site.  The servers have the P420i controllers.  Those are on the VSAN HCL, but don't support pass through, only RAID0.

One of the downsides of using the RAID0 is that you lose the hot swap functionality.  If you have a drive failure, you need to do a shutdown, replace the drive,and re-add it to VSAN.

What I'm wondering is that instead of putting each spinning drive in it's own RAID0 and presenting it to VSAN, what about creating a two drive RAID1 and presenting that to VSAN as "local" disk?  Whether it's RAID0 or RAID1, it's still going to go through the controller, so I wouldn't think there'd be any kind of performance hit, and then if you do have a failed drive, you have the hot swap functionality available.

I would use the RAID0 on the SSD, since those tend to be more reliable (and I have fewer SSD's).

I realize it would use more drives, but I'm only creating a small VSAN (around 1TB), and only considering this for the magnetic drives, so an extra drive or two isn't a big deal.

Any comments/suggestions would be appreciated.

Mike O.

[MBrownWFP]

For a production environment I would strongly advise staying within VMware's recommended and supported VSAN configuration, which would be pass-through or RAID0. VSAN is a different beast than traditional storage architectures and I would not want to introduce potential instability by using an unsupported configuration on the storage controller.

If this is a lab environment and you have time to tinker then give it a try, see what breaks and how it breaks so you know what not to do in production.

My 2 cents

Matt

[MattiasN81]

I have setup a couple is VSANs with RAID0 drives and never had to take down a node for recreate a R0 volume.

Just use he HP Smart Array Controller manager for ESXi and manage the drives on the fly, just delete the old R0 volume and create a new R0 on the new drive then add it to vSAN

[MikeOD]

Thanks for the reply.  I definitely wouldn't put any non-supported config in production.  It seems like it would work and I guess I was hoping that maybe someone has already tried it and/or found out that it was a supported configuration...

[MikeOD]

Thanks for your comments.  I'm so used to working with the array through the BIOS, I forgot about the command line Smart Array Controller manager for ESXi

[admin]

use mirror devices as local disk for vSAN is not supported. to be more detailed.

RAID 0 and pass-thought are only supported for vSAN.

Virtual SAN Hardware Guidance Part II - Storage Controllers - VMware vSphere Blog

so that please don't try it on production system.

as folks mentioned that you don't need to shutdown host to replace disk. co-work with your hardware vendor.