creating vsan datastore

[z3d3m0n]

Dear Community members,

i am trying to setup my first HA cluster and i have some hard time digging into vsan datastores.

i have two Esxi hosts both with two 480 SSD hard drives in RAID 1

can i add the existing hosts disks to vsan datastore? as far as i know the esxi can't boot from vsan datastore . What would you recommend in my situation ?

thank you in advance

[depping]

There's a lot of documentation on storagehub.vmware.com describing the minimal requirements. First of all you need two hosts + a witness host, or 3 full hosts. On top of that each host will need two devices for vSAN at a minimum, a caching device and a capacity device. You can't boot from the vSAN devices indeed, so you need two dedicated devices at a minimum per host, also you need to make sure all components are on the vSAN compatibility list.

[TheBobkin]

Hello z3d3m0n​,

"i have two Esxi hosts both with two 480 SSD hard drives in RAID 1

can i add the existing hosts disks to vsan datastore"

No - only devices without partitions on them should be added to Disk-Groups (and thus added to the vsanDatastore). The only real exception to this would be controllers+firmware that support RAID0 devices (e.g. individual RAID0 VDs applied to each device), applying RAID1 to devices before exposing them to vSAN is unsupported and I have witnessed the negative outcomes  of running in this configuration.

"as far as i know the esxi can't boot from vsan datastore . What would you recommend in my situation ?"

Either booting from something internal (e.g. SD cards or BOSS devices) or from a device attached to the vSAN controller/other controller is supported - note thought that these need to be presented in the same mode as the vSAN devices (e.g. all RAID0 or all Passthrough, not mixed).

As Duncan said, you will need a minimum of 3 nodes or 2 nodes + somewhere else to run a Witness appliance from in order to run a 'real' vSAN cluster.

Bob