Enabling vsan on the Cluster First Published On: Last Updated On:

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1 First Published On: Last Updated On:

2 1. Enabling vsan 1.1.Enabling vsan 1.2.Check Your Network Thoroughly Table of Contents 2

3 1. Enabling vsan Steps to enable vsan 3

4 1.1 Enabling vsan Enabling vsan on the Cluster Once all the pre-requisites have been met, vsan can be configured. To enable vsan complete the following steps: 1. Open the vsphere Web Client. 2. Click the Hosts and Clusters Tab. 3. Select the cluster on which you wish to enable vsan. 4. Click the Manage tab. 5. Click Settings. 6. Under vsan, Select General and click Configure. 7. Select the mode for storage disks to be claimed. The options are: Manual Requires you to manually claim the disks you want to use on each host. New disks on the host are not automatically claimed by vsan. Note that this mode is mandatory for an allflash configuration! It also is the recommended mode as it allows you to keep control over when devices are added and to which disk group they are added. Automatic Claims all unclaimed disks on the included hosts for vsan. vsan in automatic mode claims only local disks on the ESXi hosts in the cluster. Remote non-shared disks can be added manually if required. 8. When using an All-Flash configuration, you have the option to enable Deduplication and Compression. Deduplication and Compression are covered in Chapter 16 of this guide. 9. If desired Fault Domains and Stretched or 2-Node cluster options can be created as part of the workflow. As part of the basic configuration select Do not configure. 10. Click Next 11. Ensure the network validation screen is correct and click Next. 4

5 12. When the manual disk claim option has been selected you can claim all the disks at once. For each listed disk make sure it is listed correctly as flash, HDD, caching device or capacity drive. 13. Click Next 14. Verify the configuration and click Finish Once the configuration process is complete, Return to the General view. You should now show the number of flash disks in use (three, one per host) and data disks (six, two per host) that are now in use. It should also show the total capacity of the vsan datastore, which in this case is ~812GB. That is 6 x 136GB, less some overhead. Remember that flash devices do not contribute towards capacity, only the magnetic disk devices (in the case of hybrid configurations.) 5

6 1.2 Check Your Network Thoroughly Check Your Network Thoroughly Once the vsan network has been created, and vsan is enabled, you should check that each ESXi host in the vsan Cluster is able communicate to all other ESXi hosts in the cluster. The easiest way to achieve this is via the Health Check Plugin. 6

7 Why Is This Important? vsan is entirely dependent on the network: its configuration, reliability, performance, etc. One of the most frequent causes of requesting support is either an incorrect network configuration, or the network not performing as expected. Check the Network Partition Groups after Creating Cluster A network partition is when a subset of hosts (one or more) in unable to communicate to another subset of hosts. The Disk Management view (found under vsan Cluster > Manage tab > Settings) provides immediate information about whether or not there is a network partition in your cluster. If the network is functioning properly, all hosts will be in Group 1. Only if multicast routing is properly configured would vsan still function with multiple partition groups. Refer to the Network health tests under Cluster > Monitor > vsan > Health. Use the Health Check Plugin to Verify vsan Functionality Running individual commands from one host to all other hosts in the cluster can be tedious and time consuming. Fortunately, since vsan 6.0 supports a new health check plugin, part of which tests the network connectivity between all hosts in the cluster. If for some reason the cluster will not form, and displays a Network misconfiguration in the General view, you should proceed with enabling the health check plugin, outlined in the previous section. This will reduce the time to detect and resolve the networking issue, or any other vsan misconfiguration issues in the cluster. In the screenshot below, one can see that each of the health checks for networking has successfully passed. 7

8 If any of the network health checks fail, select the appropriate check and examine the details screen below for details on how to resolve the issue. Each details view also contains an AskVMware button where appropriate, which will take you to a VMware Knowledge Base article detailing the issue, and how to troubleshoot and resolve it. For example, in this case where one host does not have a vsan vmknic configured, this is what is displayed. Before going any further with this POC, download the latest version of the HCL database and run a Retest on the Health check screen. This will ensure everything in the cluster is optimal. It will also 8

9 check the hardware against the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) for vsan, verify that the networking is functional, and that there are no underlying disk problems. All going well, after the Retest, everything should still display a Passed status. At this point the Cluster health, Limits health and Physical disk health should be examined. The data health only becomes relevant once you start to deploy virtual machines to the vsan datastore. vsan, including the Health check monitoring, is now successfully deployed. The remainder of this POC guide will involve various tests and error injections to show how vsan will behave under these circumstances. 9