ManivelR
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

vSAN licensing

Hi All,

I have 10 ESXi hosts.Each ESXi host has 2 CPU sockets.I'm going to make a new cluster for vSAN along with these 10 ESXi hosts.

With respect to licensing,i need to purchase a seperate license for vSAN and  need to get seperate license for ESXi host ?

Please confirm.

daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

You must already have a vSphere license (for ESXi) in hand an in use. You will also need to separately purchase a vSAN license that covers all ESXi hosts which participate in the cluster. There are different options for that license depending on if you run in hybrid or all flash mode.

TheBobkin
Champion
Champion

Hello ManivelR

Yes, it requires it's own license in addition to ESXi - based on per-CPU, per-VM or per-CCU

Which features are available in each licensing edition can be found here:

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-vsan-66-licen...

Do not there were changes from the 6.0 licensing if you are not going ESXi 6.5/6.7

https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-vsan-62-licensing-guide.pdf

Obviously make sure you have (or can acquire) controllers, SSDs and HDDs/SSDs components that are supported for the type of vSAN implementation you are considering as using random/unsupported hardware will likely result in a bad time:

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=vsan

Bob

ManivelR
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Thank you very much.

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ManivelR
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Thanks so much everyone for quick response.

I have few doubts.

We are going to use hybrid VSAN.My question is...

1) I have 5 ESXi servers connected with seperate JBODs.I mean Each ESXi server(connected with seperate JBOD) consists of 15 TB.

5 ESXi servers======  5 * 15 TB ==== 75 TB

2) I have another 5 ESXi servers.Each ESXi servers having 1 TB local drive.

5 ESXi servers======  5 * 1 TB ==== 5 TB

Can i club all these 10 ESXi servers to make as a vSAN ?  If there is any host failure or any disk failure,it will sustain failure ? or i need to get the same storage capacity from all the 10 ESXi servers to make as a vSAN ??

I mean 10 ESXi servers===== 10 * 1 TB === 10 TB   (or)  10 * 15 TB=== 150 TB.

Another question is that,

We no need to configure any RAID from the hardware level right ?  Please confirm.

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TheBobkin
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Hello ManivelR​,

"Can i club all these 10 ESXi servers to make as a vSAN ? "

Likely not but this depends on more precisely what you have available and/or what you can add; vSAN requires a) true locally attached storage b) a combination of SSDs/NVMe for cache + HDDs/SSDs for capacity-tier (up to 7 per Disk-Group, 5 Disk-Groups per node) and c) components on the vSAN HCL.

"If there is any host failure or any disk failure,it will sustain failure ? or i need to get the same storage capacity from all the 10 ESXi servers to make as a vSAN ??"

vSAN protects data by placing mirrors of data-Objects on multiple Fault Domains - each node being a Fault Domain if not specified otherwise so for instance if you had a 10 node cluster with FTT=1 applied to the data it can tolerate one node failure and rebuild the data back to FTT=1. You don't necessarily need all nodes to contribute the same amount of storage (or technically some can have none) but this would be fairly imbalanced from a resilience perspective.

"We no need to configure any RAID from the hardware level right ?  Please confirm."

No - RAID is applied at the data-Object level (and for some controllers RAID0 individual RAID0 VDs for each device).

Bob

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IRIX201110141
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If your 10 Hosts are already licensed with vSphere ESXi than you need of course additional vSAN (3 editions available) licenses.

If not... depending on the use case of your Cluster several special Bundle or Addons are available.

VMware HCI Kit = 1 ESXi + 1 vSAN Lic

VMware vSAN Desktop = all inclusive bundle for VDI only

VMware vSAN ROBO = max 25vm per Site

External JBOD arent a valid configuration for VSAN (i only see some special for HPE Blade with external SAS)

Reuse of existing HW doesnt work well in most cases (for Lab or Testing maybe).

Regards,

Joerg

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ManivelR
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Thank you

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ManivelR
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Thank you Bob

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