Find out how to use the power of Hyperconvergence for your virtual machines with vSAN.
This guide explains how to set up VMware vSAN on OVHcloud Hosted Private Cloud.
Requirements
- Being an administrative contact of your Hosted Private Cloud infrastructure to receive login credentials
- A user account with access to vSphere as well as the specific rights for NSX (created in the OVHcloud Control Panel)
- At least three vSAN hosts
Encryption is still possible at the VM and its data level, as described in the guide Enabling VM Encryption with vSphere Native Key Provider.
Instructions
What is vSAN?
vSAN is an object storage solution offered by VMware. It gathers a set of disks situated directly on your VMware hosts, and presents them as a single datastore. This is known as Software-Defined Storage or SDS. One of the advantages of vSAN is that it is fully integrated into vSphere, and can be managed directly from vCenter.
For full concept review and technical specifications, check out the Official VMware VSAN page.
Setting up vSAN
Turn off vSphere HA
vSAN relies on the cluster’s high-availability features. Before you start any operation, you have to ensure that you have turned it off.
In the vSphere interface menu, go to the Hosts and Clusters dashboard.
On the left side, select your cluster, go in the Configure tab then vSphere Availability.
Click the Edit button.
Turn off vSphere HA and click OK.
Turn on vSAN Service
In the Cluster configuration menu, go down to vSAN / Services and click on Configure.
This guide is based on vSAN’s essential features so we will be using the default options.
All of our hosts are on the same site. We'll select Single site cluster and click Next.
We recommend using Deduplication and Compression to optimize storage.
Click Next.
The Claim disks window assigns available disks to cache or capacity (see Official VMware VSAN page for explanation) depending on types and sizes. You can customize it to your need.
Click Next.
With three hosts, fault domain is set up automatically and a single failure will be tolerated.
Click Next.
Verify the settings in the summary window then click Finish.
Go back to the cluster configuration and turn vSphere HA back on.
Your datastore is visible in the storage section and available to use.
Turn off vSAN
Before turning off vSAN, make sure to evacuate all of the virtual machines hosted on the datastore, or delete the machines you are no longer using. Click on the ‘Datastore’ tab, and check that there are no virtual machines set up on the vSAN datastore.
Delete disk groups
To delete all of the vSAN configuration details for your disks, you need to delete the group of disks created by vSAN when you turned it on.
In the Cluster configuration menu, go down to vSAN / Disk Management.
For each disk group, click on ... then Remove.
You are given the option to migrate data. With an empty datastore, there is no data migration necessary.
Click on Remove.
Repeat for each of the nodes in the cluster, until the entire disk group has been cleared.
You can safely ignore error messages regarding the health of the disk group.
Turn off Services
The same way you turned off the high-availability feature to set up vSAN, you will need to turn it off before you stop vSAN.
Once high-availability has been turned off, you can stop the vSAN service in the cluster properties by clicking Turn Off vSAN.
Confirm by clicking ‘Turn Off’ in the next window.
vSan is now off.
Go further
For more information and tutorials, please see our other Hosted Private Cloud support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.