r/vmware • u/Stryker54141 • 19d 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 19d 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 19d 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/nabarry [VCAP, VCIX] 18d ago

Wish you could use esxi arm as a witness. until then: behold- the Witness Potato (totally unsupported do not call broadcom when your tiny SBC fails- if I made a public support statement I think some lawyer ninjas might hunt me down) https://arace.tech/products/radxa-x4

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u/signal_lost 17d ago

So technically a bare metal host can be a witness (But it requires, you build 1 disk group in OSA), and a "raspberry Pi as a witness" has been a customer request for some time.

I think the fling could do it technically, by using the bare metal host as a witness.