Consider these guidelines when working with a vSAN stretched cluster.

  • Configure DRS settings for the stretched cluster.
    • DRS must be enabled on the cluster. If you place DRS in partially automated mode, you can control which VMs to migrate to each site. vSAN 7.0 Update 2 enables you to operate DRS in automatic mode, and recover gracefully from network partitions.
    • Create two host groups, one for the preferred site and one for the secondary site.
    • Create two VM groups, one to hold the VMs on the preferred site and one to hold the VMs on the secondary site.
    • Create two VM-Host affinity rules that map VMs-to-host groups, and specify which VMs and hosts reside in the preferred site and which VMs and hosts reside in the secondary site.
    • Configure VM-Host affinity rules to perform the initial placement of VMs in the cluster.
  • Configure HA settings for the stretched cluster.
    • HA rule settings should respect VM-Host affinity rules during failover.
    • Make sure HA datastore heartbeats are not enabled.
    • Use HA with Host Failure Monitoring, Admission Control, and set FTT to the number of hosts in each site.
  • Stretched clusters require on-disk format 2.0 or later. If necessary, upgrade the on-disk format before configuring a stretched cluster. See "Upgrade vSAN Disk Format" in Administering VMware vSAN.
  • Configure the FTT to 1 for stretched clusters.
  • vSAN stretched clusters support enabling Symmetric Multiprocessing Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT) VMs when FTT is set to 0 and Data Locality is set to Preferred or Secondary. vSAN does not support SMP-FT VMs on a stretched cluster with FTT set to 1 or more.
  • When a host is disconnected or not responding, you cannot add or remove the witness host. This limitation ensures that vSAN collects enough information from all hosts before initiating reconfiguration operations.
  • Using esxcli to add or remove hosts is not supported for stretched clusters.
  • Do not create snapshots of the witness host or backup the witness host. If the witness host fails, change the witness host.