Presuming that administrators are familiar with ESXi and vCenter installation, we will skip the basic vSphere installation process. For additional reference and guidance, kindly refer to vSphere Installation and Setup Guide available at https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html.

One interesting discussion point is how to build the vCenter VM that needs to reside within the VSAN datastore, since vCenter is required to enable VSAN. This argument holds good specifically in a greenfield deployment, since there is no existing platform where vCenter can be built to bootstrap a VSAN deployment. This becomes a classic "chicken and egg" situation. The solution is to essentially bootstrap VSAN without vCenter. The procedure is explained at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/VMware-TechNote-Bootstrapping-VSAN-without-vCenter.pdf.

Barring this complication, VSAN configuration is fairly straightforward. You can either create a VSAN-enabled...