Create a vSAN Datastore

You can create vSAN disk groups on standalone hosts and add the hosts to a vSAN-enabled cluster to form a vSAN datastore. You can then create a virtual machine on the vSAN datastore and assign a storage policy to the virtual machine and its hard disk.

Prerequisites

• Verify that you are connected to a vCenter Server system.
• Verify that you have access to at least three virtual machine hosts.
• Verify that each of the virtual machine hosts has at least one SSD and one HDD.
• Verify that the virtual machine hosts are in maintenance mode.

Procedure

1. Create a vSAN enabled cluster with manual disk claim mode.

   $vsanCluster = New-Cluster -Name 'VsanCluster' -Location (Get-Datacenter) -VsanEnabled -VsanDiskClaimMode 'Manual'

2. Configure a vSAN VMkernel port on each of the three hosts.

   New-VMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost 'Host-A' -PortGroup 'VMkernel' -VirtualSwitch 'vSwitch0' -VsanTrafficEnabled $true
   New-VMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost 'Host-B' -PortGroup 'VMkernel' -VirtualSwitch 'vSwitch0' -VsanTrafficEnabled $true
   New-VMHostNetworkAdapter -VMHost 'Host-C' -PortGroup 'VMkernel' -VirtualSwitch 'vSwitch0' -VsanTrafficEnabled $true

3. Create a vSAN disk group on each of the three hosts.

   New-VsanDiskGroup -DataDiskCanonicalName 'HDD1-CanonicalName' -SsdCanonicalName 'SSD1-CanonicalName' -VMHost 'Host-A'
   New-VsanDiskGroup -DataDiskCanonicalName 'HDD1-CanonicalName' -SsdCanonicalName 'SSD1-CanonicalName' -VMHost 'Host-B'
   New-VsanDiskGroup -DataDiskCanonicalName 'HDD1-CanonicalName' -SsdCanonicalName 'SSD1-CanonicalName' -VMHost 'Host-C'

4. Add each of the three hosts to the vSAN cluster to create a vSAN datastore.

   Move-VMHost -VMHost 'Host-A' -Destination $vsanCluster
   Move-VMHost -VMHost 'Host-B' -Destination $vsanCluster
   Move-VMHost -VMHost 'Host-C' -Destination $vsanCluster

5. Revert the virtual machine hosts to the Connected state.

   Set-VMHost -VMHost 'Host-A','Host-B','Host-C' -State 'Connected'

6. Create a virtual machine on the vSAN datastore.

   $vsanDS = Get-Datastore -Name 'vsanDatastore'
   $vm = New-VM -Name 'newVM' -DiskMB 1024 -Datastore $vsanDS -VMHost 'Host-A'

7. Create a storage policy by using any of the vSAN capabilities.

   $cap = Get-SpbmCapability -Name vSAN*
   $rule = New-SpbmRule $cap[1] $true
   $ruleset = New-SpbmRuleSet $rule
   $policy = New-SpbmStoragePolicy -Name 'vsan policy' -RuleSet $ruleset -Description 'vSAN-based storage policy'

8. Assign the storage policy to the virtual machine and its hard disk.

   $vmHdd = Get-HardDisk -VM $vm
   Set-SpbmEntityConfiguration $vm, $vmHdd -StoragePolicy $policy

9. Check the compliance of the virtual machine and its hard disk with the storage policy.

   Get-SpbmEntityConfiguration $vm, $vmHdd

   The status should be Compliant.