Steps to install VSAN (under construction)

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.

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