Verify that the ESXi hosts in your organization meet the Virtual SAN hardware requirements.

Storage Device Requirements

All capacity devices, drivers, and firmware versions in your Virtual SAN configuration must be certified and listed in the Virtual SAN section of the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Table 1. Storage Device Requirements for Virtual SAN Hosts
Storage Component Requirements
Cache
  • One SAS or SATA solid state disk (SSD) or PCIe flash device.
  • Before calculating the Number of failures to tolerate, verify that the size of the flash caching device in each disk group provides at least 10 percent of the anticipated storage consumed on the capacity devices, not including replicas such as mirrors.
  • vSphere Flash Read Cache must not use any of the flash devices reserved for Virtual SAN cache.
  • The cache flash devices must not be formatted with VMFS or another file system.
Virtual machine data storage
  • For hybrid group configuration, make sure at least one SAS, NL-SAS or SATA magnetic disk is available.
  • For all-flash disk group configuration, make sure at least one SAS or SATA solid state disk (SSD) or PCIe flash device.
Storage controllers One SAS or SATA host bus adapter (HBA), or a RAID controller that is in passthrough mode or RAID 0 mode.

Memory

The memory requirements for Virtual SAN depend on the number of disk groups and devices that are managed by the ESXi hypervisor. Each host must contain a minimum of 32 GB of memory to accommodate for the maximum number of five disk groups and maximum number of seven capacity devices per disk group.

Flash Boot Devices

If the memory of the ESXi host is less than 512 GB memory, boot the host from a USB, SD, or SATADOM device. When you boot a Virtual SAN host from a USB device or SD card, the size of the boot device must be at least 4 GB.

If the memory of the ESXi host is greater than 512 GB, boot the host from a SATADOM or disk device. When you boot a Virtual SAN host from a SATADOM device, you must use single-level cell (SLC) device and the size of the boot device must be at least 16 GB.

When you boot an ESXi 6.0 or later host from USB device or from SD card, Virtual SAN trace logs are written to RAMDisk. These logs are automatically offloaded to persistent media during shutdown or system crash (PANIC). This is the only support method for handling Virtual SAN traces when booting an ESXi from USB stick or SD card. Note that if a power failure occurs, Virtual SAN trace logs are not preserved.

When you boot an ESXi 6.0 or later host from a SATADOM device, Virtual SAN trace logs are written directly to the SATADOM device. Therefore it is important that the SATADOM device meets the specifications outlined in this guide.