irgNET – LAB 7.0 U1
As I mentioned in the last HomeLab Update, I will post all upgrades in my infrastructre monthly from now on. This time we will talk about the expansion of my VMware vSAN OSA ROBO 2-Node Cluster. My personal VMware vSAN journey started about 1 year ago:
Back that time I had a usable capacity of about 3 TB, over time I have converted my single tier applications to high availability solutions. For example, I use a second VMware Horizon Connection Server , a second license server for my NVIDIA P4, AD/DNS, etc.
Beside HA functions I am implementing and testing/using more and more applications and I am running out of 3TB. My VMware vRealize LogInsight (now VMware Aria Operations for Logs) alone consumes about 1TB of my vSAN cluster. So bigger resources (cache & capacity) must come, luckily I had the chance to become following hardware for each host:
1x Intel DC P3700 800GB NVMe (in the past 512GB)*
5x Dell 1.92TB Read-Intensive SAS SSD (in the past 800GB)
1x 10GbE 2 Port for Management and VM Network (in the past 1GbE)
1x 40GbE 2 Port for vSAN and vMotion (same in the past)
*with vSphere 8/vSAN 8 we are able to use up to 1.6TB devices as Cache Tier.
Thanks to this capacity expansion, I have trippled the usable capacity and still use the same Storage Policy:
Useable capacity is approx. 9TB
Raw capacity is approx. 19TB
To swap the cache and capacity devices, I had to delete the disk groups first, power off my hosts and change the cache and capacity devices. Then I had to built the new disk groups and apply the above mentioned storage policy.
On the network side, all hosts (as described in the last few HomeLab updates) are equipped with 10GbE NICs and the 1GbE interface is “End of Life” – except for the iDRAC. The vSAN and vMotion between the 2 Nodes are still communicating via 40GbE crossover. For this purpose, I made a infrastructure picture, as I did back then:
Current State of the my environment:
Well this VMware vSAN upgrade should be more then enough for future use and that is it from this HomeLab Update. If you have any questions, especially where and how to start a HomeLab, please leave it in the comments 🙂