VCF 5.1 Deep Dive: vSAN ESA

For other 5.1 deep dives:

• Multi pNIC/Multi VDS Deployment.. via the UI!
• Distributed Virtual Port Group Separation for Management Domain Appliances
• Custom Edge Cluster Deployments
  

We now support vSAN ESA for both the management domain and VI Workload domains.
That’s right, we can do bringup and use ESA, pretty cool!

Deploying a VI WLD/cluster with vSAN ESA is available through the UI and API.
For more information about vSAN ESA, please check out this link.

The requirements for vSAN ESA are as follows:

• Supported hardware!
• Internet access (proxy is fine) OR vSAN HCL JSON downloaded.
• vLCM image mode, that’s right. This is a hard requirement for ESA.

So what about using vSAN ESA in the management domain where we use vLCM baselines? Well, you guessed it. We now support vLCM image mode in the management domain! That being said, we don’t support conversion from vLCM baseline mode to vLCM image mode just yet.

Currently, there’s no support for vSAN ESA stretched clusters, and there’s no conversion from vSAN OSA to vSAN ESA.

Updates to HCI Mesh

HCI Mesh is only supported between OSA and OSA, and ESA and ESA. No mixing!
HCI Mesh compute only nodes are supported.
Cross VC HCI Mesh? Not supported from VCF UI/API. User needs to configure using vCenter

Updates to the Host Commissioning

Introduced new storage type called VSAN_ESA
Host commissioned as VSAN cannot be used for VSAN ESA & vice versa

Hosts are validated for compatibility with vSAN ESA
           Version is supported for vSAN ESA
           Hardware is compatible with vSAN ESA (HCL checks)