8.0 u1

I did a vSAN File Services Considerations posts earlier this year and recently updated it to include some of the changes that were introduced for vSAN 7.0 U1. Considering vSAN HCI Mesh, aka Datastore Sharing, is also a brand new feature, I figured I would do a similar post. In this post, I am not going to do a deep-dive of the architecture, but I simply want to go over some of the considerations and best practices for implementing vSAN HCI Mesh. I collected these recommendations, and requirements, from our documentation and some VMworld sessions.

First of all, for those who don’t know, vSAN HCI Mesh allows you to mount a remote vSAN Datastore to a vSAN Cluster. In other words, if you have two (or more) vSAN Clusters, you can access the storage capacity from a cluster remotely. Why would you? Well, you can imagine that one cluster is running out of disk space for instance. Or, you may have a hybrid cluster and an all-flash cluster and want to provision a VM from a compute perspective on hybrid, but from a storage point of view on all-flash. By using Datastore Sharing you can now mount the other vSAN Datastore and use it as if it is a local datastore. [Read more…] about vSAN HCI Mesh Considerations