Where do I download the vSAN File Service OVA?

Last few weeks I had this question at least three times, surprisingly as I thought it wasn’t too difficult to find. The question was if my vCenter Server has no connection to the internet, where do I download the vSAN File Service OVA file that I can use to setup vSAN File Service manually? The UI provides the option to manually load it, but doesn’t provide a pointer to the location on the website where you can download it.

And actually, it is fairly simple, you go to vmware.com/downloads. You pick “VMware vSAN” as the product, then click on the “Drivers & Tools” tab, and then unfold “VMware vSAN Tools, Plug-ins and Appliances” and you should see the OVAs listed for the various versions. After you download the OVA, you can simply upload it from your desktop via the vCenter Server UI and continue the configuration of vSAN File Service.

As most of you probably know, vSAN File Services is not supported on a stretched cluster with vSAN 7.0 or 7.0U1. However, starting with vSAN 7.0 U2 we now fully support the use of vSAN File Services on a stretched cluster configuration! Why is that?

In 7.0 U2, you now have the ability to specify during configuration of vSAN File Services to which site certain IP addresses belong. In other words, you can specify the “site affinity” of your File Service services. This is shown in the screenshot below. Now I do want to note, this is a soft affinity rule. Meaning that if hosts, or VMs, fail on which these file services containers are running it could be that the container is restarted in the opposite location. Again, a soft rule, not a hard rule!

Of course, that is not the end of the story. You also need to be able to specify for each share with which location they have affinity. Again, you can do this during configuration (or edit it afterward if desired), and this basically then sets the affinity for the file share to a location. Or said differently, it will ensure that when you connect to file share, one of the file servers in the specified site will be used. Again, this is a soft rule, meaning that if none of the file servers are available on that site, you will still be able to use vSAN File Services, just not with the optimized data path you defined.

Hopefully, that gives a quick overview of how you can use vSAN File Services in combination with a vSAN Stretched Cluster. I created a video to demonstrate these new capabilities, you can watch it below.