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