You can edit the settings of your Virtual SAN cluster to change the method for claiming disks and to enable deduplication and compression.

Edit the settings of an existing Virtual SAN cluster if you want to enable deduplication and compression, or to change the method for claiming disks. If you enable deduplication and compression, the on-disk format of the cluster is automatically upgraded to the latest version.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the Virtual SAN host cluster in the vSphere Web Client.
  2. Click the Configure tab.
  3. Under Virtual SAN, select General.
  4. Click the Virtual SAN is turned ON Edit button.
  5. (Optional) Select the mode in which storage devices must be claimed.
    Option Description
    Automatic Claims all empty devices on the included hosts for Virtual SAN. Virtual SAN in automatic mode claims only local devices on the ESXi hosts in the cluster. You can add any remote, nonshared devices manually.
    Manual Requires manual claiming of the devices on the included hosts. New devices on the host are not added to Virtual SAN. With the manual mode, two methods of organizing devices into disk groups exist, semi-automatic and manual.
    Note: When you use this mode, a Virtual SAN datastore is created, with the initial size of zero byte. The datastore remains unusable until you manually claim devices.
  6. (Optional) If you want to enable deduplication and compression on the cluster, select Deduplication and compression Enabled.
    Virtual SAN will automatically upgrade the on-disk format, causing a rolling reformat of every disk group in the cluster.
  7. Click OK.