VMware vSAN 8+: The Complete Guide for Professionals

Explore storage virtualization that abstracts physical resources into virtual storage pools, enabling vendor independence, centralized administration, and scalable, high-availability storage with replication, snapshots, and disaster recovery.

Compare legacy SAN topology with converged architecture that integrates compute, storage, and networking in one rack, including LUNs presented as shared storage and vSAN enabled hyper-converged infrastructure.

vSAN is a scalable, enterprise-grade software-defined storage built into VMware vSphere, managed via vCenter, using disk groups with cache and capacity disks to form a shared data store.

Explore vSAN 8+ deployment models: OSA and ESA, using VMware validated designs to separate management and production workloads. Learn OSA’s two-tier cache and capacity architecture for all-flash or hybrid storage.

Analyze how vSAN places components across a four-host cluster, using active and passive copies with a witness as a tiebreaker, and understand cache and capacity tier storage.

Learn to view and change vSAN storage policies in vSphere, adjust replication like RAID 1 and stretched clusters, and create custom policies for virtual machines.

Understand drive endurance and drive writes per day (DWP) ratings to size vSAN clusters, with read-intensive, mixed-use, and write-intensive drives, noting that reads don't wear out but writes do.

Learn to safely evacuate an ESXi node from a vSAN cluster by putting it into maintenance mode with a full data migration, guided by skyline health checks and disk validation.

Explore how vSAN uses a memory-based logical log as a fast write cache and a physical log on SSD or NVMe to ensure quick acknowledgment and durable storage.

Explore vSAN ESA objects and architecture, where VM data, home namespace configuration files, and disks are stored as objects; learn how log structured file system handles snapshots with reduced overhead.

Compare the OSA and ESA snapshots, showing ESA's log structured file system logs block changes for instant, scalable snapshots with consistent performance.

Explore log-structured filesystem in vSAN8, detailing a performance and capacity leg, in-memory 128 KB full-stripe writes, IO amplification, and a simplified single storage pool design.

The witness VM acts as a tiebreaker to prevent split brain and ensure continuous access in two-node vSAN ESA clusters and stretched clusters, holding cluster metadata rather than data.

Deploy a vSAN witness node VM to maintain quorum in two-node and stretched clusters. Use two vmkernel adapters on separate vswitches and ensure a 200 ms RTT with vSAN nodes.

onboard the witness VM into the vCenter inventory, then configure two vSwitches for vSAN traffic and management, and separate witness clusters for ESA and OSA.

Plan a vSAN 8 ESA cluster deployment by configuring an image-only ESA, onboarding four hosts, and provisioning a distributed switch with vmkernel adapters for vmotion and vSAN traffic.

Configure a vSAN 8 ESA cluster by creating a data center cluster, manually selecting the ESXi image, onboarding hosts, and enabling vSAN services with encryption in a single-site fault-domain setup.

Enable the vSAN file services appliance to provide shared storage for nfs and smb access, configure and provision both file shares, and manage quotas from the command line.

Enable and deploy vSAN file services to publish SMB and NFS shares from a vSAN cluster, using stateless file service VMs, a dedicated network port group, and domain integration.

Carve block-based iSCSI data stores from the vSAN datastore to provision shared storage for physical servers, backups, and external workloads such as clustering using the iSCSI target service.

Enable the vSAN iSCSI service, create an iSCSI SAN on the vSAN datastore, and provision two LUNs; attach to a Windows host and initialize, format, and use them.

Simulate a forced host failure in a vSAN iSCSI setup to observe failover, VM relocation to a surviving host, and path management by witnesses, then resync and restore health.

Power up a vSAN 8 cluster from the ui by booting the witness appliance for quorum, then bring ESXi hosts online, restart vSAN services, and run health checks and prechecks.

Power up a vSAN 8 cluster from the CLI by enabling and disabling maintenance mode on ESXi hosts, running reboot scripts, verifying vSAN services, and applying vCenter and HR settings.

Configure two physical ESXi servers into a two-node vSAN 8 cluster with a mirrored datastore, supported by a witness appliance to maintain quorum in remote and edge offices.

Deploy a two-node vSAN 8 cluster using ESA witness appliances, image-based installation, and IP-based addressing, detailing manual configuration, fault domains, and a two-node raid 1 datastore policy.

Configure fault domains in two-node and stretched vSAN to group hosts by sites or racks, mirror data across domains, and use a witness as a tie breaker for resilience.

Replace a failed witness host in a two-node vsan stretched cluster by adding a new witness appliance and performing a resync to restore health.

Configure a stretched cluster in vSAN across two data centers to enable disaster recovery and continuous availability, with a witness enforcing quorum and FTT=1.