Month: October 2017

Part 2: Expending vSAN 6.6 Datastore after initial VCSA bootstrap

by saurav116, posted in ESXi 6.5, Uncategorized, vCenter 6.5, VMware, VSAN 6.6, vSphere 6

This post is in continuation with my previous post “Bootstrap vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 on vSAN 6.6” ,refer to the below link:

Bootstrap vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 on vSAN 6.6

I will cover the expansion of the vSAN datastore created during the VCSA bootstrap in the previous blog post.

The first thing after vCenter deployment is to add the hosts in vCenter and configure the VMkernel interface for vSAN traffic (and any other VMkernel interface) on each host. I have personally configured the VMK interface on the standard switches and later migrated them to the VDS (I am not covering the standard to distributed switch migration in this post).

This is how VMkernel networking looks on hosts:

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Now turn on the vSAN by clicking on edit option under Cluster -> VSAN –> General -> Edit

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Cluster –> configure -> under vSAN click on Disk management ->claim disks

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In manual mode vSAN will show you all the eligible HDD and SSD which can be claimed from the Hosts in the cluster with vSAN VMK configured

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Above is the list of all the HDD from the 3 hosts, to claim the HDD simply click on “claim for capacity tier”.

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Similarly we can claim all the flash resources from the eligible host by clicking on “claim for cache tier” .

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Once you claim the SSD and HDD resources, vSAN will start the creation of the disk groups, you can see this in the vCenter recent tasks:

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Go to the vSAN Datastore summary to confirm if the total capacity is reflecting the storage from all vSAN host in the cluster.

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That’s all for this. Let me know if you have any feedback’s and do share this is you consider the posts worth sharing.

Part 1: Bootstrap vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 on vSAN 6.6:

by saurav116, posted in ESXi 6.5, ESXi6, Uncategorized, vCenter 6.5, VMware, VSAN, VSAN 6.6, vSphere Web Client

I have recently installed vSphere 6.5 and vSAN 6.6 in our lab, I have got 4 vSAN Hybrid ready nodes ,  which I will use to setup a vSAN cluster.

Most interesting thing with the 6.5 vSphere release apart from the HTML client and other enhancements  is the ability to bootstrap VCSA on a target host by creating a vSAN datastore. With earlier version we used to deploy the VCSA on a temporary data store and later storage vMotioed to the vSAN datastore.

“Jase McCarty” has written a cool blog on the same, you can refer to the below link for details:

Bootstrap the VCSA onto vSAN 6.6

However, I will try to cover the deployment in more details including all the screenshot which can help people deploying vSAN 6.6 for the first time. So let’s get started.

I have installed ESXi 6. 5 on all 4 nodes. It’s time to install the vCenter to configure the vSAN Cluster.

Mount the VCSA installer and run the installer.exe file:1

Wizard is similar to previous VCSA 6.x install until we reach the “Install – Stage 1: Deploy PSC” page:11.png

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I am deploying the External PSC appliance, however the process is similar for Embedded PSC as well.1

The Screenshot is self-explanatory, I am deploying the vCenter appliance on ESXi host “172.24.1.101” .

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Select yes for the certificate warning.

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This is where we will be creating a vSAN datastore locally on the host and install VCSA. Note that during bootstrapping, you don’t need to have vSAN Network configured on all the nodes. At this moment vSAN Datastore is local to the host, I will cover in another blog post how to expand the vSAN Datastore by claiming the disk from other nodes in the cluster.

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Provided you are using a vSAN compatible controller and Drives, ESXi will detect the flash and HDD resources in the server. In case ESXi is not detecting Flash or HDD, you can manually tag local storage resources as SSD or HDD in this step. For checking the vSAN compatibility, refer to the link below:

VMware Compatibility Guide

 

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Enter the required networking details for the PSC, make sure to configure the DNS host name resolution (forward and reverse) of PSC before deployment .

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Finish and wait, the deployment took less than 5 minutes

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Looking at the host client, I can now see a new “vSAN datastore” and PSC getting deployed on newly created vSAN Datastore.

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Once done, we need to configure the appliance size and SSO in stage 2, refer to the below screenshots:

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Here you can either join the PSC to an existing SSO (if exists) to run a linked mode configuration or if it is a new deployment select the “create new SSO domain”.

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That’s it for PSC deployment, now we need to run the same installer, this time we will install the vCenter server.

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Select the vSAN datastore created during the PSC installation.

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Enter the network configuration for the vCenter server:

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Finish and wait, you can actually see the VCSA deployment progress by login in to the target host.

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With this now we need to configure the SSO for the vCenter server to complete the deployment.

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That’s it for this post , I have covered the expansion of vSAN datastore by claiming storage resources from rest of the hosts in below post :

Expending vSAN 6.6 Datastore after initial VCSA bootstrap