In this series of posts, I’m going to run through the setup of my homelab vSAN instance.
vSAN is VMware’s virtual SAN technology, that takes storage from vSphere hosts and aggregates it into the form of logical storage that can be accessed collectively across these hosts.
This storage can be all flash, or a mixture of disk and flash (hybrid).
There are various considerations and requirements for vSAN which I’m going to run through as part of this series.
Requirements
In order to deploy vSAN, there are a number of requirements that need to be met:
Capacity Disk(s) – At least drive per host for storage of data. If you’re looking at a hybrid vSAN this can be a hard drive, if you want all-flash it needs to be an SSD.
Caching Disks/SSDs – An SSD per host for caching of data. In a production deployment this cache drive should be at least 10% of the anticipated storage on the capacity disks.
Memory – Running vSAN requires memory footprint per host, however the amount required is not fixed and depends on a number of factors (size of caching tier, capacity tier, number of disks, vSAN mode and so on). There’s a helpful VMware KB Article that runs through the various factors that influence this memory requirement.
Networking – For a hybrid vSAN, 1Gb/sec networking is fine, but to get the most out of a flash configuration, 10Gb/sec is recommended.
Hosts/Nodes – A standard vSAN cluster must contain a minimum of 3 hosts that contribute storage capacity to the cluster.