vSAN + FT 6.5 on local storage

[damemate]

Hi,

I want to know if this is a by design issue or if I'm maybe not following the guidelines for vSAN.

I have a 3 host cluster, running vSAN and I want to enable FT on host A + B, but using only local storage for VMDKs and the vSAN as the place for VMX and Tie Breaker files, however that's not being recognized as a shared storage by vCenter so this scenario won't work.

If I place the entire VM on the vSAN I can turn on FT with no problems and it will run fine.

Servers are Dells R720XD, 10Gbe, Enterprise Plus. ESXi and vCenter are 6.5.

Unrelated, I also tried to create a iSCSI target via vSAN, but the ESXi can't see the LUN. Do vSAN supports iSCSI LUNs for other ESXi's? I could map the LUN ok via Windows.

[TheBobkin]

Hello

This is by design and likely due to adhere to all VMs components being Objects as opposed to a mismatch of File and Objects:

Using Virtual SAN Datastores

vSphere Fault Tolerance can use Virtual SAN datastores, but you must observe the following restrictions:

■ A mix of Virtual SAN and other types of datastores is not supported for both Primary VMs and Secondary VMs.

https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-60/index.jsp#com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/GUID-2A87B967-5BBB-4394-B1...

I can also think of other logical reasons that this should be avoided:

- Host A goes down, Host B VM becomes Primary, but runs without a Secondary until Host A comes back - If all VM components were located on vSAN, VM A could get restarted on Host C while Host A was down and become Secondary.

As a side-note: the default controllers in your servers (Dell R720XD = H710P controller) is not supported for use with vSAN 6.5, and also an aside to this side-note: Using local disks on the same controller as vSAN-disks can cause real problems with some controllers, notable the H710P' predecessor the H730P, all the H710P' I can find use megaraid_sas as opposed to lsi_mr3 drivers though so you are probably fine here, more info anyway:

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2136374

Regarding iSCSI Targets:

These only currently works mapped to Guest-OS' not to vSphere/Hosts, this capability may be added in future but no solid words regarding this yet.

Bob

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