vSAN ESA Absolute Minimum Requirements For Test/Lab Instance

[IamTHEvilONE]

Does anyone have some guidance on what is the absolute bare minimum requirements for vSAN ESA?

I have an existing 3 node vSphere 8 cluster and looking to see what I can do to create a 1.6-2TB vSAN ESA.

1. This is strictly for testing/protocol purposes.
2. It'll need to use the bare minimum, even if unsupported hardware.
3. It'll only run long enough to complete some test workflows and subsequent debugging/troubleshooting as required.

The reason I'm asking is that I can't afford 128GB memory per node, but currently have 64GB + 2x10G LAG network ... CPUs are 10th Gen Intel with between 12 and 20 cores.

If I could strap in 3x2TB SATA SSDs and ignore a bunch of warnings, that'd be ideal ... but a lot of the guidance is around the official & supported configurations.  The servers do not have any additional space for NVMe/m.2 based drives aside from the OS slot.

[IamTHEvilONE · Accepted solution]

Eventually found my answer externally.

https://vninja.net/2022/11/24/vsan8-esa-in-homelab/

Basically, as long as the drives are big enough (1.6TB), all other warnings/errors can be ignored.

Now to see if I can get some 2TB NVMe drives on sale over the next little while.

[TheBobkin]

@IamTHEvilONE, If this is just for a homelab/test and you aren't concerned about the devices being on the HCL, performance testing etc.,  then drive size or anything like that really doesn't matter - if you just want to test/check basic things then you don't need to use multiple physical servers but can instead use a nested ESXi setup (e.g. ESXi running as VMs on any hypervisor or even on a desktop on VMware WorkStation) but for even less effort (assuming don't need specific OSes/images/internet access) then you can just spin one up on HOL:

https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/

[IamTHEvilONE]

I effectively have 3 hosts running Intel 10900T CPUs + 64GB memory + 2x10G network (LAG)

I have exactly space to add in a PCIe x1 Riser in each node to provide an additional m.2 2280 drive slot.  I know the speed is limited by the Gen3 slot at x1, but I'm testing to know if basing things work ... performance doesn't matter.

If even a 1TB drive x3 works, that gets my cost down since I basically need a functional Windows OS running on the drive for VSS (OS) + vStorage/VDDK & vSphere API tests.