Question about Setup

Super6VCA · ‎04-06-2016

I am currently in a bind with my current storage and would like to start utilizing Virtual SAN. All my hosts are running Esxi from a Flash drive that is mirrored. So here are my questions.

1. Do i NEED to have Flash drives in the VSAN pool of disks? Can i just have all SAS or SSD's?

2. If i were to add drives will i need to reconfigure the server or can my current setup go uninterrupted. Wasn't sure if I could just add drives and pool them and go.

Any help is appreciated. Would like to make this as painless as possible. Thanks again.

Thank you, Perry

zdickinson · ‎04-06-2016

Good afternoon. I'm assuming the mirrored SSD that are there currently have some sort of file system/data on them. If so, they cannot be used by vSAN. If you can evacuate them and then wipe them, they could be used.

You can do vSAN in a hybrid config. 1 SSD backed by up to 7 HDD. Or all flash. 1 Enterprise SSD backed by up to 7 Consumer SSD.

For hybrid, the SSD is divided into 30% write cache to be destaged onto the HDD and 70% read cache. For all flash, the Enterprise SSD is 100% write cache as the read performance of the Consumer SSD should be sufficient.

You will definitely need some host maintenance time to implement vSAN.

Some things to keep in mind. Minimum 3 nodes, I would do 4 nodes so you can do a rebuild if one goes down. Get a really good controller, high queue depth. Please for the love, stick to the HCL. If this is production and you're new to it, find a local vendor to help out.

Good luck.

Super6VCA · ‎04-07-2016

Thanks for the reply. The mirrored flash drives are running the OS on the host. I realize that i can't use them in the VSAN config but what i was curious about i, do I have to have a flash drive as part of the VSAN setup? I was hoping to be able to add a few SSD drives to my current host and setup VSAN. Was curious if that is a possible setup. Thanks again for the info. Much appreciated!

Thank you, Perry

zdickinson · ‎04-07-2016

Good afternoon, yes vSAN requires at least 1 SSD per host contributing storage. OK, technically you can flag a HDD as SSD, but that's not supported, would have poor performance, and is not a good idea. Thank you, Zach.