Some good VSAN related KB articles that you should read

The VMware Knowledgebase is always a fountain of great information. Even if you don’t have a problem with vSphere, there are a lot of general purpose informational and how-to articles that can help you out and educate you. There are a number of KB articles related to VSAN that you should definitely check-out that contain a lot of good tips for using VSAN. I’ve highlighted a few of them below:

vSphere 5.5 Virtual SAN requirements (2058424)

What you need to know before you start using VSAN, do you have what it takes to be able to run it?

Enabling or disabling a Virtual SAN cluster (2058322)

The simple stuff, how to turn VSAN on and how to turn it off.

Horizon View 5.3.1 on VMware Virtual SAN – Quick Start Guide (2073795)

If you want to run Horizon View on VSAN, here’s everything you need to know to do it.

Retaining virtual machines of Virtual SAN Beta cluster when upgrading to vSphere 5.5 Update 1 (2074147)

If you’re already running the Beta version of VSAN, what should you do to upgrade? Hint: You can’t, move those VMs or lose them

Adding more than 16 hosts to a Virtual SAN cluster (2073930)

VSAN can scale to 32 hosts but apparently they found this out late in the game and didn’t fix their code to let you do that. This KB article gives you CLI way to do it.

Virtual SAN node reached threshold of opened components (2071379)

There are a number of objects that are stored on a VSAN datastore for each VM. There is a soft-limit of 100 VM’s per host with VSAN but there is a hard limit of 3,000 objects. You may see an alert if the number of VM’s and associated objects gets to close to the 3,000 limit.

Configuring Virtual SAN VMkernel networking (2058368)

What you need to know to properly configure virtual networking for VSAN on either a standard or distributed vSwitch.

Virtual SAN insufficient memory (2071753)

Uh-oh, not enough host memory to run VSAN. If you have less than 32GB of RAM in a host you may need to increase it depending on the number of disks you are using.

VMware Virtual SAN datastores cannot store host-local and system swap files (2073944)

There is a special vswp VM file object built into in VSAN but you can’t store other VM vswp files on it that are not hosted on VSAN. You also can’t out your ESXi host scratch partition on a VSAN datastore.

Storing ESXi coredump and scratch partitions in Virtual SAN (2074026)

Here’s where to put your ESXi coredump and scratch partitions when using VSAN.

Adding a host back to a Virtual SAN cluster after an ESXi host rebuild (2059091)

The necessary CLI steps that you need to take to add a host back to a VSAN cluster.

Enabling or capturing performance statistics using Virtual SAN Observer for VMware Virtual SAN (2064240)

If you want to see VSAN performance stats, here’s how to do it.

Adding additional hosts to an existing Virtual SAN cluster (2059936)

It’s pretty simple, not sure why they need a KB article for it but if you don’t know here’s how to do it.

vSphere High Availability (HA) fails to restart a virtual machine when VMware Virtual SAN network is partitioned (2073949)

If you want HA to work on VSAN, make sure the VMkernel adapters used by VSAN do not share a subnet with the VMkernel adapters used for other purposes.

Virtual SAN device encounters a permanent error when devices are not readable or writeable (2071075)

Like your VMs and don’t want to lose then, you might want to set your HostFailuresToTolerate to greater than 1.

Want even more VSAN info, also check out my huge VSAN link page.

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