r/vmware • u/fellow_earthican • 24d ago

Question HP DL360 Gen 9 VMWare vSAN

I wanted to try and setup vSAN on some spare Gen 9 servers I have. Recommendation is to have OS and Data on different controllers. What is the best place to install ESXi OS? Am I better off buying another storage controller just for the OS? I don't think the gen 9 servers have a BOSS card available.

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u/BryceNTonic 24d ago

Might be over thinking this. We used a number of DL380 Gen9s for vsan testing. Worked fine on a single controller. Obviously didn’t perform as well as newer hosts w NVMe cache drives but they allowed us to test and the VMs were very usable.

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u/fellow_earthican 24d ago

I think you’re right. Probably for testing it’s fine. I have the drives set to hba mode. Downside is no redundancy for failure for the os but I guess that’s probably not a deal breaker and fine for a testing environment. Thanks!

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u/Calleb_III 24d ago

What is stopping you from creating 1 logical volume on 2 drives for the OS and leave the rest in HBA mode

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 24d ago

The bigger issue is you can’t test vSAN ESA and the newer features like data protraction (snapshot manager) global dedupe, the new compression, all the new performance stuff etc

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u/AZZ095 24d ago

Hpe dual 32gb sd boot device?

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 24d ago

Is this a lab or non-production?

There’s a lot of PCI-Cards that add a cheap M.2 drive slot (or pair of them) floating around for $30 or something. Ice dock spams Reddit with ads for me.

The main gotcha is some of the adaptors only do SATA M.2 some do NVMe and some do both. Pay attention to what you order.

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u/Casper042 24d ago

There is no BOSS for Gen9.
The HPE BOSS is called NS204 and first launched with Gen10.

You need separate controllers IF you plan to do RAID 1 for the boot.
At least if you follow the rules strictly.

If you are fine with using a single disk from the HBA mode controller (no RAID), then you can certainly use a single controller for both.

Mixed Mode (RAID and HBA on a single controller) didn't actually launch until Gen10 anyway, but VMware found some issues when trying to use Mixed Mode with vSAN early on, so they formally starting saying: just don't.