Advice on building a vSphere v6 VSAN POC

alias454

I am looking into building out a VSAN POC cluster using some old hardware and would like some help/advice with the initial configuration. I have 3 DL380 G6 servers, each with 48GB of RAM, 2x6x2.67GHz (24cores), 2x72GB 15k SAS disks, 2x200GB SSD's, 4x300GB 10k SAS disk running on a 410i RAID controller, and using Qlogic QLE3242 10GbE Dual port adapters.

First off, is there anything that won't work for a VSAN cluster in the above mentioned hardware?
Second, and I feel dumb for asking but can/should the SSD's be configured in a RAID 1+0? I have already configured the drives and installed ESXi v6 on the 72GB drives but I am not clear on the hardware setup for the other drives.

I think getting this right prior to deploying my vCenter instance will be a good idea to keep from from redoing it later.

Thanks in advance.

Essendon

Just check if the gear's on the HCL. I remember reading an article on reddit where the guy's controllers were lower-end and a rebuild of the VSAN took days.. What I'm getting at is you dont want to get caught unawares.

Take a step back and think about it. VSAN needs to ensure HA of your data and it distributes it optimally as it needs to. So you don't need to RAID your SSDs.

Take your time and go through the VSAN config guides so you get it right the first time. You can deploy vCenter before you create a VSAN cluster, no worries there. vSphere 6.0 allows for an all-flash VSAN if you'd like to check that feature out.

One thing I'm always want to know. Why are you doing the PoC? What are you trying to check/achieve? Make sure you put on real workloads, artificial workloads wont achieve much. You want to check for real world performance not synthetic. Peak performace/Real-world? 100% read for example, is absurd. Just about no environment is read-only is it.

With any PoC, create a success criteria so you are validating it against your requirements within the constraints while meeting your goals.

alias454

According to the HCL, the HP Smart array 410i is supported under vSphere v6, the G6 is not on the list, However, the DL380 G7 is supported using the 56xx procs, which is what I am running in the G6's. I am mainly looking at the viability for a small package that can be dropped in one of our remote branches built out on some DL360 G9's if I see good results from my test. The configuration will not be used for production but we will have a significant test workload that will mimic a small segment of prd. The main idea will be to deploy 3, 1U servers and setup a small cluster to use for DR replication. A secondary reason is to setup a decent sandboxed environment. reading the DOCs is on my list but I wanted to get some input on the general config and implementation. I mainly had a question about the Drives so thanks for answering that. I will spend some time on this tomorrow and will post back any oddities I come across.

Regards,