Pre-requisites for VSAN Deployment
Pre-requisites for VSAN Deployment
4 hosts must contain local storage. Local storage must comprise of at least one empty HDD & one empty SSD, and must be supported by VSAN as per the VMware Compatibility Guide.
The 4 hosts with storage must have a separate boot device. For hosts with less than 512 GB of memory, the boot device can be an SD card, a USB drive, or a dedicated hard drive. For hosts with 512 GB of memory or greater, the boot device must be a separate magnetic disk or solid-state drive.
Each host must contain a RAID Controller that is capable of running in pass-thru mode (aka HBA mode) or RAID0 mode. The RAID Controller must be supported by VSAN as per the VMware
Compatibility Guide.
1 x vCenter Server with vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing (an evaluation license is used if only vSphere Enterprise is available)
3 ESXi Hosts added to a Cluster. No services should be enabled on the cluster initially (no HA, no DRS and no Virtual SAN)
10Gb network is preferable and is highly recommended for production environments, but Virtual SAN can & will work with a 1Gb network. The network also needs to support Layer-2 multicast (e.g. IGMP
Snooping). Virtual SAN does NOT require Layer-3 multicast.
A vMotion VMkernel port must be configured for each host. If IP storage is available for virtual machine templates or ISOs, this must also be configured.
A virtual machine with an installed Guest OS should be available. If this is not available, a new virtual machine will have to be created and a Guest OS installed.