beginners question to use local storage

[fafa24]

Dear All,

I'm new with Virtual SAN and I wanted to use the local storage left on my physical ESXi hosts. We have Vsphere 5.5 (latest build) with 4 hosts.

Each host has had a local datastore of about 40GB. I like to use this space for View Horizon desktops because the disks are SSD.

First I did create a VSAN without deleting the local datastores on each host. VSAN showed that no disk are available. So I thought to delete all local datastore (they were not in use anyway) to free up the space for VSAN.

VSAN shows now all four disk and the "not available) is gone, created automatically a VSAN store, but there is no space available.

The VSAN network is shown as "normal"

What I'm missing here? Can I not create a VSAN with available space on my hosts disk? Do I need a dedicated disk on each host to create a VSAN?

Thanks,

Edy

[zdickinson]

You will need at least 1 SSD and 1 HDD in each host for vSAN.  Each disk group can have 1 SSD and up to 7 HDD.  Before vSAN can claim the drives they need to be cleaned, by which I mean no partitions.

It sounds like all of your local storage is SSD.  If that is the case they could be claimed, but there would be no space available as you do not have any HDD for capacity.

All information is for vSAN 5.5  Thank you, Zach.

[Ramakrishna Kempaiah]

VSAN uses a notion of diskgroups.

Diskgroups consists of (1 SSD + 1 or more HDDs upto 7)

Like wise you can have upto 5 diskgroups in a single host provided you have enough disks per host.

SSD is used for cache tier and HDD is used for capacity tier.  datastore capacity is aggregate of all HDDs used for diskgroups in the vsan-cluster

you need minimum two **unused** disks per host. and one of them being SSD

In VSAN6.0, we are supporting ALL-Flash configuration in which case, you will need 2 minimum unused disks both of them need to be SSDs

Thanks,

[fafa24]

Thank you for your answers! It was very helpful and I have learnt something.

Thanks,

Edy

[Duncan Epping]

Was your problem solved? First make sure you meet the following requirements:

1 x SSD per host (non-formatted)

1 x HDD per host (non-formatted)

Make sure the disk controller is on the HCL using the prescribed bios/driver version. Now create the VSAN datastore in manual or fully automatic mode. In manual you will need to create these things called disk groups yourself per host, in fully automated VSAN does everything for you. When you create a disk group you will need to select 1 SSD and 1 HDD (at a minimum) per host.

[CoolRam]

I would suggest while creating the vSAN you should choose the Manual Option and Explore how vSAN work and behavior. That will help you for the future use and implementation of  vSAN. 

IN a Manual Mode you can choose the option to  add or remove the disk which you want.