Fortunately, because vSAN is embedded within the ESXi hypervisor, many vSAN operations tasks are simply extensions of normal vSphere operations. Understanding how the solution behaves during normal (or “day two”) operations is important to consider as part of the evaluation. In this guide, we will examine how to systematically test against disk, host, network, and control plane failures.

As a software solution, vSAN is designed to be resilient against these failures. Such failures can occur among storage controllers, disks, nodes, and network devices among other components. These can be grouped into three common types: resiliency testing, performance testing, and operational testing.Īs with any storage solution, failures can occur on hardware components at any time due to age, temperature, firmware, etc. Day-2 Operations: Monitoring, management, troubleshooting, and upgrades.Validation: vSAN features are working as expected (File Service, Deduplication and Compression, RAID-5/6, checksum, encryption).Performance: vSAN and selected hardware can meet the application, as well as business needs.Serviceability: Maintenance of hosts, disk groups, disks, clusters.Reliability: VMs and data remain available in the event of failure (host, disk, network, power).VMs successfully deployed to vSAN Datastore.Successful vSAN configuration and deployment.The most important aspects to validate when testing are: Setup and configuration of the required solution (in the case of vSAN) The post-design phase, installation of the infrastructure components, including: the hypervisor (in the case of ESXi) control plane (vCenter) physical network uplinks and upstream network devices essential services, such as DNS and NTP VLANs, etc. The testing lifecycle can be broken into three phases: Once the appropriate hardware is selected for testing, it is useful to define the use case, goals, expected results and success metrics. See the ‘Prerequisites’ section of this guide for more information. There are many variables with hardware (drivers, controller firmware versions) so be sure to choose hardware that is on the VMware Compatibility List. Space Efficiency Defined by Policy (vSAN ESA)Ĭhoosing the appropriate hardware is one of the most important factors in the successful validation of vSAN.Assign a new Storage Policy to an Existing VM.Deploy a new VM with a New Storage Policy.Storage vMotion a VM Between Datastores.

vMotion a Virtual Machine Between Hosts.VSAN Proof of Concept: vSAN Architecture Overview & Setup

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