Does the vSAN Appliance have to reside on a vSAN Cluster?

[Tim Seery]

Does the vSAN Appliance have to reside on a vSAN cluster? Our vSAN does not recognize the vSAN ESA cluster.

Our current 8U3 vSphere environment consists of the following:

• (1) Management Cluster (no VSAN datastore) - vCenter/vSAN Snapshot Appliance
• (1) Workload Cluster (vSAN ESA datastore)

The snap-in's deployed and the appliance is a running but receive the following message:

"vSAN data protection is only supported in vSAN HCI clusters powered by vSAN ESA.

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[Francesco Grimaldi]

Hi,

yes, I can confirm that the vSAN appliance must be deployed on a vSAN cluster. In fact, according to the official KB, during the deployment phase, in the "Compute Resource" section, it is required to select a vSAN cluster.

Here is the official KB for reference:
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/388526/deploy-vsan-snapshot-service-appliance-f.html

I hope this helps.
Thanks and have a great day!

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Francesco Grimaldi
VMware Certified Instructor
VMware vExpert
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[Mattew Ross]

I'm totally agree with @Francesco Grimaldi.

Furthermore remember that vSAN Data Protection (appliance) requires a trusted vCenter Server certificate. 

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[TheBobkin]

@Tim Seery - vSAN Data Protection will only work for VMs stored on vSAN ESA vsanDatastore - this is due to this feature/product being reliant on leveraging ESA b-tree based snapshot mechanism, thus it will only work for such protecting workloads in vSAN ESA vsanDatastores.

@Francesco Grimaldi - Your reply looks to be AI-generated, please refrain from such things as they are generally not helpful and likely violating terms of usage of this platform.

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[Francesco Grimaldi]

Hi, @TheBobkin

I invite you to review the attached documentation. As stated explicitly in the official guide:
"vSAN data protection is supported on vSAN HCI clusters powered by vSAN ESA. It uses native vSAN snapshots to capture the current state of your VMs. You can use vSAN snapshots to restore a VM to its previous state, or clone a VM for development and testing."

You can find this information at the following link:
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsan/vsan/8-0/vsan-administration/expanding-and-managing-a-vsan-cluster/using-vsan-data-protection.html

Regarding my previous reply, is there anything specific that concerned you, or do you feel it was not helpful?

Regards.

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Francesco Grimaldi
VMware Certified Instructor
VMware vExpert
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[Tim Seery]

Dug though the vSAN Snapshot Appliance logs, turns out there were (2) issues:

1.) The vSAN Snapshot Appliance Snapin was not deploying even though the Snapin was installed, it was from an earlier installation. I redeployed the appliance in the workload domain, the Snapin deployment was failing due to a firewall rule. The vCenter needs to connect to the vSAN Snapshot Appliance via TCP port 8443.

2.) The vSAN Snapshot Appliance can be deployed in ANY cluster. The only requirement for vSAN snapshots is that the appliance and vCenter can communicate AND the cluster is an vSAN HCI ESA cluster.

Thanks,

/Tim

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