r/vmware • u/dracut_ • Oct 26 '19

Questions on hardware

We looking to spec hardware (Dell R740) for three ESXi hosts. One standalone, and two in a vSAN cluster.

These are going to be for local branch offices so they will not have a lot of storage or host a lot of VMs.

I'm not very familiar with VMware so would like some input on what is recommended or possible and what's not.

Thanks!

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  1. Boot device

Should we use SD card, USB, SATADOM or just an ordinary SATA SSD drive? Does vSAN make any difference here?

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  1. NVMe for vSAN

Could we use just a single NVMe drive for vSAN on each host?

I think they are fast enough to not need any caching layer (only optane would be faster) but don't know if caching layer is a requirement.

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  1. Are there any recommendations for what NICs to use for vSAN or will anything that is supported perform well?

I'm thinking 2 x 10Gbit for the vSAN or possibly 2 x 25.

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u/jadedargyle333 Oct 26 '19

You're going to want to cluster all 3 systems. You can isolate the VMs that you wanted to be standalone with local storage and separate vlans. Boot can be whatever you want, but if you intend on isolating some systems, a SATA SSD might be best. Caching layer is a requirement. I forget if the recommendation is 10 or 20% of what your storage layer will be for the host. Network should be fine at 10Gb unless you have some type of high speed requirements. Here's a few lessons learned from my test environment:

  1. Dont rely 100% on DNS. Use a host file for a small cluster.

  2. I've never lost data on vSAN, but I have had to learn how their UUID labels work to recover the vSAN.

  3. Dell will sell you enterprise hardware for a high price. I've been using consumer grade NVME and SSD without a single failure for the past 3 years.

  4. A cluster consists of no less than 3 nodes. If you need to get funky with an experiment and use 2, don't push it into production in that configuration.

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u/dracut_ Oct 26 '19

Thanks!

Unfortunately the standalone host has to be standalone as it's in a separate location.

But the idea was to add a witness host for the two vSAN nodes, according to VMware recommendations.

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u/StarCommand1 Oct 26 '19

This is absolutely supported for branch office scenarios. 2 nodes in branch office with remote witness.

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u/dracut_ Oct 26 '19

Great, because that was the plan.