Steps to install VSAN (under construction)

This post contains important steps to create a VSAN-volume in a cluster. The list does not claim to be comprehensive.

1. FW Update Server – especially SSD (this is most often a good idea!)
2. Configure Array Controller (in this case P420i; FW-Version: v5.42)
   • if necessary, configure a boot Array/logical drive
     for each disk contribute taking part of an disk group create an array and a log. drive of level raid0 works fine with current firmware, because its just one task (“create array with raid 0”) to create all arrays/drives at once!
   • disable cache for every raid 0 drive
     drive is to configure in Cache Manager by deselect all raid0-drives
3. Configuration network
   • separate VLAN
   • if possible use dedicated infrastructure
   • NIC Teaming: active/passive or Link aggregation
     just a few ports available: consider a vSwitch for VSAN and vMotion with active/standby vice versa
   • configure vmkernel-port and enable VSAN traffic on that port
4. Edit/create Cluster
   • enable VSAN feature (manual or automatic)
   • if manual, claim disks
   • check storage providers on vCenter level; 1 provider should be online, the rest should be in standby.
   • assign license
5. Create VM Storage Policies
   • select vendor VSAN and define the rules you need
   • the matching datastores are just the datastores, that can understand the policy. it does´t mean, they meet the requirements!
6. Check after creation
   • after the store is built and VMs allocating space from that volume, check the distributed objects.