I have some customers who are running both traditional storage and vSAN in the same environment. As most of you are aware, vSAN and VMCP do not go together at this point. So what does that mean for traditional storage, as in with traditional storage for certain storage failure scenarios you can benefit from VMCP.
Well the statement around vSAN and VMCP is actually a bit more delicate. vSAN does not propagate PDL or APD in a way which VMCP understands. So you can enable VMCP in your environment, without it having an impact on VMs running on top of vSAN. The VMs which are running on the traditional storage will be able to use the VMCP functionality, and if an APD or PDL is declared on the LUN they are running on vSphere HA will take action. For vSAN, well we don’t propagate the state of a disk that way and we have other mechanisms to provide availability / resiliency.
In summary: Yes, you can enable HA VMCP in a mixed storage environment (vSAN + Traditional Storage). It is fully supported.
Hi Duncan, what about the Heartbeat datastores? When using vSAN te recommendation is to “use datastores only from the specified list” but don’t select a datastore. In a mixed environment, any thoughts on this?
There’s an article about couple weeks ago discussing the heartbeat Datastore and vsan: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2017/11/08/vsphere-ha-heartbeat-datastores-isolation-address-vsan/