Book Image

VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook

By : Jeffrey Taylor
Book Image

VMware Virtual SAN Cookbook

By: Jeffrey Taylor

Overview of this book

VMware Virtual SAN is a radically simple, hypervisor-converged storage, designed and optimized for vSphere virtual infrastructure. VMware introduced the software to help customers store more and more virtual machines. As data centers continue to evolve and grow, managing infrastructure becomes more challenging. Traditional storage solutions like monolithic storage arrays and complex management are often ill-suited to the needs of the modern data center. Software-defined storage solutions, like VMware Virtual SAN, integrate the storage side of the infrastructure with the server side, and can simplify management and improve flexibility. This book is a detailed guide which provides you with the knowledge you need to successfully implement and manage VMware VSAN and deployed infrastructures. You will start with an introduction to VSAN and object storage, before moving on to hardware selection, critical to a successful VSAN deployment. Next, you will discover how to prepare your existing infrastructure to support your VSAN deployment and explore Storage policy-Based Management, including policy changes, maintenance, validation, and troubleshooting VSAN. Finally, the book provides recipes to expedite the resolution process and gather all the information required to pursue a rapid resolution.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Preparing the vCenter cluster for VSAN

There are some cluster-level prerequisites that must be satisfied before VSAN can be enabled. As we have already discussed, you will need a minimum of three hosts, with a minimum of one SSD and one spinning disk or capacity-tier SSD per host. This is probably optional, but it would help with 5.5/6.0 convergence of the text.

In addition, the following prerequisites need to be satisfied:

  • Disable vSphere HA
  • Apply licensing
  • Configure networking
  • Tagging disks as SSDs if using RAID-0 mode

Getting ready

You should be logged in to the vSphere Web Client as an administrator or user, authorized to alter cluster-level settings. All VSAN operations must be executed via the vSphere Web Client. The legacy vSphere Client is not supported for VSAN operations.

How to do it…

  1. To disable vSphere HA in preparation for VSAN enablement, you must browse the vSphere Web Client. Navigate to Home | Hosts and Clusters | Datacenter | Cluster | Manage:
    How to do it…
  2. If vSphere HA is enabled, click...