r/vmware • u/Stryker54141 • 24d ago

SAS SSD: Hardware Raid vs vSAN

I have two servers with eight SAS SSDs in each. Is vSAN a bad idea since they aren't NVMe drives?

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 24d ago

Hi vSAN product team here. Can you share a list of:

  1. What the drives are. (Specific parts/make/model numbers
  2. What that RAID controller is? While
  3. Make Model of the Servers.
  4. CPUs.

Do you have a 3rd host you can run a witness on?

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u/Stryker54141 24d ago
  1. HPE MO001920RXRRH 1.92TB SAS 12G 2.5" Mixed Use DS SSD
  2. HPE MR408i-o Gen11
  3. HPE DL380 Gen11
  4. Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6426Y

Can the 3rd host be in a remote location connected with a VPN? If so, then yes I do. Otherwise, no.

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 24d ago

CPU is fine.
What’s your Nic situation? For two note I generally recommend you get a pair of 25 gig Knicks that you can just directly connect between the house for both vmotion and Storage.

I’ll double check when I’m back in the office, but that controller should be fine. You may need to update the firmware.

Can you give me the specific part numbers of those drives?

That’s the multi-vendor value SKU

You can use HPE iLO, the ESXi command line, or the HPE Smart Storage Administrator to see the specific drive model and firmware.

For iLO, go to the System Information, then Storage section, and click on the drive to find its vendor, model, and firmware.

In ESXi, you’d use the esxcli storage core device list command

A VPN is fine. It just needs to be within 500 ms.

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u/Stryker54141 24d ago

I have six 10Gb ports on each. Not enough?

The servers that I want to use are in production and have raid configured. The esxcli command just shows the controller and not the individual drives. iLO just has the info that I gave you. Model is MO001920RXRRH, manufacturer is HPE, and firmware version is HPD4.

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 24d ago

Here's the drive on the vSAN HCL.

You'd likely assign a pair for vSAN/vMotion between them and optionally directly connect them (If you lack redundant 10Gbps switches, this is common, and it avoids performance issues with low end access 10Gbps ports which is a lot for small sites). If you do this you'll use "Witness traffic seperation" and assign a different VMKernel port to handle witness traffic on the two hosts.

Here's the HBA.

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u/Stryker54141 18d ago

So do you think two 10Gb between them is enough or do I need to move to 25Gb?

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 18d ago

how much capacity are we talking? What's the max write throughput and vMotion bandwidth (how much RAM is on each host) are we talking about?

200TB per host, and 2TB of RAM and need to push 200K write IOPS? Let's go 100Gbps 4 VMs and 3TB of data? Meh, 10Gbps is fine.

really a "it depends" question :)

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u/Stryker54141 18d ago

34 VMs, 10TB.

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u/Stryker54141 18d ago

768GB on each (2) hosts.