Question about Virtual SAN Partition

[Wanly]

We know that Virtual SAN can handle partition scenario for single component. But what does it handle multi components scenario?

For example:

VM1 has 3 components - Home/VMDK1/VMDK2 on a 4 nodes Virtual SAN cluster.

If the cluster split 2 partitions which 2 nodes due to multicast problem. Home and VMDK2 reside on partition 1 and VMDK1 reside on partition 2.

What does HA do on this scenario? In my test environment, the VM1 can not start. Is it reasonable?

Thanks.

[zdickinson]

It depends on vSAN 5.5 or vSAN 6.  This is how it's handled in 6, VSAN 6.0 Part 1 - New quorum mechanism - CormacHogan.com

In your case, your essentially created a failure of 2 nodes and a 4 node cluster can only have a max failure of 1 with rebuild space.

Thank you, Zach.

[Wanly]

It's Virtual SAN 6 cluster.

Actually we have 6 nodes, the cluster split 2 partitions. Each partition has 3 nodes.

We can found that the cluster had been split to 2 cluster. Each cluster has their own master node.

We have 60 testing VMs on this cluster. Some of them report component missing. If the components were stored in 2 partitions. The VM can not be started.

Wanly

[zdickinson]

Why did it get split into two partitions?

I'll stick with my original answer.  Split like that is essentially a 3 host failure and with 6 nodes, the most FTT you can have is 2.  Thank you, Zach.