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

Adding disks to VSAN


As your infrastructure grows and your needs for capacity and/or performance changes, you may need to scale up your VSAN cluster by adding disks or disk groups to the existing VSAN nodes. This can be done online, and new disks/disk groups will be immediately available for provisioning, rebuild, and rebalance operations.

If you are in the auto-claim mode for VSAN disks (see Chapter 2, Initial Configuration and Validation of Your VSAN Cluster), VSAN will automatically claim any new disks and distribute them in the manner that it determines to be optimal. If you wish to override these decisions or manually define how your disks will be allocated, please disable the auto-claim mode. This process is outlined in the Removing disks from VSAN recipe in this chapter.

Tip

It is a strongly recommended best practice to maintain symmetry in the VSAN cluster. If you add disks or disk groups to one node, you should add the same number of disks of equivalent capacity to the other nodes...