Utilizing host local storage

vSphere 5.5 introduced a new feature called Virtual SAN (vSAN). This feature allows utilizing a host's local storage to create a shared distributed storage for VM placement.

vSAN is a software-based solution built into ESXi; it's scalable and easy to configure and manage.

Getting ready

vSAN requires a license separate from vSphere and vCenter. The feature is licensed on a per-CPU basis.

The minimum infrastructure requirements for vSAN are:

• Each host that is a part of the vSAN cluster has to have at least one Solid State Disk (SSD) and one Hard Disk Drive (HDD).
• At least three hosts with local storage are required.
• At least 1 Gbps network ports are required.

Also, it is recommended to:

• Use 10 Gbps NICs.
• Have a VMkernel vSAN adapter on every physical NIC.
• Have a 1:10 ratio between SSD and HDD capacity.
• Hardware RAID is not required and it's better to have just a bunch of disks without any hardware RAID configured.
Create more disk groups of a smaller...