I’ve seen a few questions around this, is it possible, or supported, to use vSAN Datastore Sharing aka HCI Mesh to connect OSA with ESA? Or of course the other way around. I can be brief about this, no it is not supported and it isn’t possible either. vSAN HCI Mesh or Datastore Sharing uses the vSAN proprietary protocol called RDT. When using vSAN OSA a different version is used of RDT than with vSAN ESA, and these are unfortunately not compatible at the moment. Meaning that as a result you cannot use vSAN Datastore Sharing to share your OSA capacity with an ESA cluster, or the other way around. Hope that clarify things.
Luke says
Hi Duncan and guys,
I want to share here our story.
We have successfully set up a dedicated vSAN Mesh cluster using spinning disks to handle low to medium IO data, with the intention of integrating it with our production vSAN. However, we’ve encountered a significant issue: it appears that migrating specific disks to the remote vSAN is not feasible. We’re facing an error that states, “Cannot complete file creation operation. Failed to create object.”
As a temporary solution, we’ve found that we can move the entire virtual machine to the remote vSAN and then transfer the disks back to their original vSAN. This workaround is far from ideal (speechless) and raises concerns about the practicality of the system, especially considering the scale of operations.
For instance, consider a scenario where we have a 100TB VM and need to move 20TB to a remote vSAN that has 50TB of free space. This is not just a hypothetical situation; it’s the exact challenge we’re facing.
We have reached out to Broadcom to address this issue and are awaiting their response. However, I must admit that I’m skeptical about the viability of this solution. It seems to fall short of our expectations for a production environment.
Duncan Epping says
Please note, what you are trying to do is something we do not officially support today in the product. You cannot have a VM which has part of it locally and parts remote. This is unsupported.
Cioby says
You can use iscsi to present a lun to the specific VM. It is a better option then to try something unsupported