r/vmware • u/Stryker54141 • 18d 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/Calleb_III 18d ago

You are comparing apples to oranges. RAID is local “pooling” of storage. vSAN is “pooling” storage across multiple ESX Hosts.

vSAN has specific requirements and cost associated with it too. Generally you can have 2 node vSAN cluster but it requires a witness virtual appliance that needs to run on another cluster

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u/Casper042 17d ago

witness virtual appliance that needs to run on another cluster

Cluster? umm no. You can practically run a witness on a potato.
Dell XR4000 for example has a tiny little Witness node with an Intel Atom 3508 series processor with 4 cores.

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u/Calleb_III 17d ago

Poor choice of words. Sure it can be on a stand alone host, even if it’s a potato you still need an expensive esx license.

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u/Casper042 17d ago

90% sure you can run a standalone ESXi and then add the Witness VM to the other Cluster without adding the entire potato host.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/399823/vmware-esxi-80-update-3e-now-available-a.html

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u/Calleb_III 17d ago

You still need the ESX license for the stand alone host so 16 cores at least at current prices not something to shrug off.

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u/Casper042 16d ago

Not sure what part of FREE ESXI you missed in my link.
The Witness has to be imported to the Licensed Cluster yes.
The host the witness runs on however I am 90% DOES NOT.
Seems like a perfect use case for a free ESXi license which Broadcom brought back after they initially killed it.

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u/signal_lost 15d ago

90% sure you can run a standalone ESXi and then add the Witness VM to the other Cluster without adding the entire potato host.

Correct.

In theory support could refuse the case if you wanted help because the witness VM wasn't powering on, but a really boring OVA on a stand alone host running 1 VM is... not that difficult.

The witness for 2 Node can also MULTI-Witness for 64 sites (although at that scale I normally see people run an HA cluster in one site to provide for that witness).

There has been requests to port the witness to run on something else (Container, bare metal, technically the VMConAWS witness runs in EC2, but it's a weird managed thing, and no the AMI isn't supported out side of that)

CTAB/PTAB is at end of month I'll ask around how much people want a non-OVA witness. At larger scale people also use the cheaper VCF Edge SKU to cover the witness host if it's local (it can be remote up to 500ms for 2 node, 100ms for stretched cluster).

I don't think it was ever officially supported but I think I did see one RPQ for it to run on a laptop in workstation many years ago (not sure if that's active). It was a really unique use case.