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DAVIDsTEA
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vSAN RAID?

Hi Guys,

We're looking into setting up a new infrastructure using vSAN to possibly save on hardware costs.  I'm like to know 2 things...

  1. Since it is only recently out of Beta, how reliable is vSAN so far?
  2. Do we need to configure hardware RAIDs on our systems or does vSAN have it's own fault tolerance?
    1. We're planning on using lots of SSD storage so I'm wondering if we have to setup a RAID for those SSD disks or can we save on costs and rely on vSAN for fault tolerance?  We want to save on costs and SSD is $$$$ expensive!

Any info will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Nick.

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Isalmon
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When you choose a box make sure the Raid controller card is JBOD (Pass through)...which allows VSAN to manage your disks to create disk groups. The alternative is that you have to set up each disk as its own a RAID 0 for VSAN to see the disk. Then you will have to go to the  Esxcli console and mark which ones are SSD by command line.  Could be a pain on lots of hosts and lots of SSD's.  I had to do this with a PERC H710.

So far I am impressed with VSAN. I had a host failure (RAID controller card) a few months after...other than a few hiccups..everyone has been working as normal on the remaining two hosts with the cluster basically broken.

I tested lots failure scenarios before this...Yanking power on a host to see what happens while test users were working on VM's on that box...and everything so far was impressive. Users lost connections and in two minutes were able to log in. Their VM's were on another host..with NO physical connection between the offline host. Really amazing stuff so far..

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Chassdesk
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Nick,

A couple things:

  1. Free VMware Virtual SAN Fundamentals [V5.5] class 60min
  2. Do the VSAN 101 Hands on lab if you have not already you will learn allot and it is free www.vmware.com/go/vsanlab
  3. You can build the cheapest VSAN node possible but what are your requirements and workloads and will the node meet your requirements.
  4. The minimum requirement is 1 SSD per VSAN node if you are doing a single disk group per node times minimum 3 esx hosts.
  5. You do not need disk raid at the controller level and can define the number of replicas 1, 2 or 3 depending on the number of nodes in your VSAN cluster.
  6. Check out  http://www.yellow-bricks.com/virtual-san/
  7. Look at the VSAN ready nodes to get an idea of some common configurations http://partnerweb.vmware.com/programs/vsan/Virtual%20SAN%20Ready%20Nodes.pdf
  8. If you decide to build anything before you order make sure the parts are on the VSAN HCL VMware Compatibility Guide: vsan

Lots of great resources around to assist.

Isalmon
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When you choose a box make sure the Raid controller card is JBOD (Pass through)...which allows VSAN to manage your disks to create disk groups. The alternative is that you have to set up each disk as its own a RAID 0 for VSAN to see the disk. Then you will have to go to the  Esxcli console and mark which ones are SSD by command line.  Could be a pain on lots of hosts and lots of SSD's.  I had to do this with a PERC H710.

So far I am impressed with VSAN. I had a host failure (RAID controller card) a few months after...other than a few hiccups..everyone has been working as normal on the remaining two hosts with the cluster basically broken.

I tested lots failure scenarios before this...Yanking power on a host to see what happens while test users were working on VM's on that box...and everything so far was impressive. Users lost connections and in two minutes were able to log in. Their VM's were on another host..with NO physical connection between the offline host. Really amazing stuff so far..

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