One of the most import prerequisite for VSAN configuration is local disk and SSD. Minimum of 3 ESXi 5.5 hosts with all contributing local disks (1 SSD and 1 HDD) to VSAN cluster and atleast 1 SAS or SATA solid state Drive (SSD) should be part of each ESXi host with SSD is not claimed by vSphere Flash Read Cache. This posts explains you with the procedure to setup VSAN using VMware Workstation but how do you use SSD. This complete post series talk about setting up VSAN lab feasible for everyone. All my ESXi hosts are running on top of the VMware Workstation. So i don’t have SSD for that. Will it stop me to setup my VSAN lab on workstation. Definetly No. Ohh.. Then how do i use SSD (important pre-requisite for VSAN configuration). Don’t worry. There is a option to fake your ESXi hosts local disk as SSD. Thanks and all credit goes to William Lam for his excellent post about faking the ESXi local disks as SSD. Let’s see the detailed step by step procedure to configure this bypass.
Below is the disk configuration of all the 3 ESXi hosts running on VMware Workstation.
4 Local Disks created on the VMware Workstation
Disk 1 – 40 GB (Local Datastore and ESXi install disk)
Disk 2 – 10 GB (Going to fake this disk as SSD)
Disk 3 – 40 GB
Disk 4 – 20 GB
Below is the disk layout of my ESXi host. You can notice that none of the below disks are SSD. So it is not yet eligible for VSAN cluster.
From the above list of 4 disks, None of them are SSD and all are local disks created using VMware Workstation. I am going fake one of the local disk “mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0” with the capacity of 10.00 GB as SSD. Let’s take the detailed procedure to configure it. This step needs to configured on all the 3 ESXi hosts since minimum one SSD disk from each ESXi host is the pre-requisite for VSAN cluster.
Connect to your ESXi host using SSH connection such as Putty. You can list the disks in your ESXi host using the below command
ls -l /vmfs/devices/disks
You can use the below command to display the properties of the disk “mpx.vmhba1:c0:T1:L0”
esxcli storage core device list –device=mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0
You can see from the above output that your disk ” “mpx.vmhba1:c0:T1:L0” is local and Is SSD: flase. So it stats that it is not the SSD disk as per the ESXi host. We are going to fake this local disk as SSD using the below command
esxcli storage nmp satp rule add –satp VMW_SATP_LOCAL –device mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0 –option “enable_ssd“
You need to reclaim the device using the below command so that added rule will apply.
esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0
After you faked the local disk as SSD. Verify the properties of the disk “mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0” using the below command
esxcli storage core device list –device=mpx.vmhba1:C0:T1:L0
Same can be verified from your vSphere Web client -> ESXi Host -> Manage Tab -> Storage -> Storage devices. You can notice the disk “mpx.vmhba1:c0:T1:L0” now listed as SSD after the above configuration.
Above step needs to configured on all the 3 ESXi hosts to fake the one of the local disk as SSD to eligible for VSAN. That’s it. We are done with disk preparation for VSAN. I hope this will be informative for you. Thanks for reading !!!.