VMware VSAN

Mr-White · 16 Oct 2013 at 14:41

Has anyone else tried the beta version of VMware's VSAN, what sort of hardware are you running it on ?

MW

Mr-White · 19 Oct 2013 at 19:32

I've just updated all 3 of my test hosts and installed ESXi onto USB drives to free up the mechanical disk. I've just got to sort out SSD for the cache but i'm hoping it will let me use more USB devices instead

MW

Mr-White · 20 Oct 2013 at 17:43

you'll need some SSD

2.2.3 Solid-State Disks
Each vSphere host must have at least one SSD when participating in the VSAN cluster. The SSD provides both a
write buffer and a read cache. The more SSD capacity the host has, the greater the performance, because more
I/O can be cached.

MW

Mr-White · 22 Oct 2013 at 08:43

Dogers said:
although I'm guessing there's not much on the HCL at this stage!

This is what i'm trying to find out

MW

Mr-White · 12 Nov 2013 at 12:44

gavind said:
By the way, are there also SSD specification requirement for it to be compatible using VMware?

Yes there's a hardware compatibility list, however there are things that will work that aren't on there.

MW

Mr-White · 16 Nov 2013 at 16:14

I use Crucial V4s in mine.

I have 4 hosts with 1 disk group per host and each disk group has 1 SSD and 2 SATA disks of various sizes. The total mechanical disk storage is 1844GB but only 867GB is showing up in the VSAN datastore. I know it duplicates data across the disks but can't work out why it's used almost 1TB :confused:

On each host it shows 3 of 3 disks are in use.

MW

Mr-White · 18 Nov 2013 at 21:01

Dogers said:
Do you have one disk that's quite a bit smaller than the others? Or maybe one that's quite a bit bigger? It could be VSAN is throwing the rest of it away in its calculations like a RAID controller would..

This is what I thought but the size difference between the largest and smallest is quite a bit

1. 250GB
2. 500GB
3. 64GB SSD

1. 250GB
2. 320GB
3. 64GB SSD

1. 250GB
2. 80GB
3. 64GB SSD

1. 250GB
2. 80GB
3. 64GB SSD

After doing some maths it could actually be true, if we assume it matches all the 250GB disks together and and then only takes 80GB (smallest disk size) of each of the 4 disks and total them up. Then devide this by 2/3, with 1/3 being lost to the redundancy, it would actually total just over 800GB.

MW