I personally am a huge fan of vSAN. Each new release of vSAN offers new improvements and functionality. As of right now Virtual SAN can deliver all-flash performance with up to 100,000 IOPs per host and can support vSphere availability technologies like High Availability (HA), asynchronous replication, stretched cluster capabilities, and storage efficiency features for all-flash including deduplication, compression and erasure coding.

Prerequisites and Notes

1. Should have its own dedicated vSwitch
2. Needs one SSD and two local disk total
3. Needs a minimal of three host
4. HA may need to be turned off temporary to activate vSAN for the first time. Once done you can go back and turn it back on.
5. Other Host not participating can see the vSANdatastore as well

Preparing the vDS Switch for vSAN

1. Login to vSphere Web Client

   

2. Click on Home > Networking

   

3. Right click on vDS switch and select Distributed Port Group > New Distributed Port Group
4. Provide a name for the vSAN Port Group

   

5. Edit the amount of ports and click on Next

   

6. Click on Finish

   

7. You should now see a vSAN port group

   

Preparing Host for vSAN

1. Login to vCenter Web Client
2. Click on Home > Host and Clusters

   

3. Select a host and click on Manage > Networking

   

4. Click the VMkernel Adapters >
   Add Host Networking () button

   

5. Select VMkernel Network Adapter and click on Next

   

6. Select an existing port group and click on Next



7. Select the vSAN port group and click OK



8. Click on Next

   

9. Check Virtual San traffic and click on Next

   

10. Select Use static IPv4 settings and enter the information and click on Next

    

11. Click on Finish

    

12. Repeat these steps for each host you want to add to the vSAN Cluster

Configuring vSAN

1. Select the Cluster and click on Manage > Settings > General and then click on the Edit button

   

2. Check the box Turn ON virtual SAN and choose Manual from the drop down and click OK

   

3. Click on Disk Management in the left menu

   

4. Click the icon

   

5. Select all the disk you want to add to vSAN and click on OK
6. You are now ready to use your vSAN datastore

   

7. Click on Storage and you should now see your vsanDatastore

In this example we will create a storage policy to enable performance and extra high availability benefits.

1. Logon on to the vSphere Web Client and Click on Home > Policies and Profiles

   

    

    

2. Click on VM Storage Policies

   

1. Click on the icon to create new storage policy

   

1. Provide a Name and click on Next

   

    

2. Click on Next

   

    

    

3. We are going to create a redundant and performance policy in this demo although you have a choice of just selecting one.
   1. Change Rules based on vendor-specific capabilities to vSAN
   2. Click on <Add Rule> and select Number of failures to tolerate
      1. Number of Failures to Tolerate indicates resiliency against host, network, or disk failures in the cluster. Increasing this number will cause VSAN to create copies of the object on additional hosts, up to 4 copies total that would allow for three concurrent failures without data loss
   3. Click on <Add Rule> and select Number of disk stripes per object
      1. Increasing the number of disk stripes per object will cause the VMDK to be striped across more HDDs. This can result in better performance for disk reads that are not serviced from the cache on SSD, because more HDDs can service the read operations simultaneously.
   4. (Optional) Flash Read cache reservation %
      
      1. Flash read cache reservation increases the size of the read cache for VMs using this policy, which can improve performance by increasing the SSD cache hit rate and using fewer reads from HDD
   5. Click on Next when completed

   

1. Click on Next

   

1. Click on Finish

Applying Storage Profiles to VMs

Applying storage profiles provide redundancy and performance benefits

1. Select a Virtual machine and then click on Manage > VM Storage Policies > Manage VM Storage Policies
   

   

1. Select a Storage Policy and click on Apply to disks. Click on OK

   

1. Wait for the configuration to fully apply and then click the refresh button to see if it now compliant