Part 2: Expending vSAN 6.6 Datastore after initial VCSA bootstrap

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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.