Prerequisites
- Verify that your environment meets all hardware requirements. All hardware must be on the VMware HCL. Also all disks and HBA controller must be on the VMware vSAN-specific HCL.
- Ensure that you have vSAN networking configured. For more information, see Configuring vSAN VMkernel Networking (2058368).
- For best performance, the environment should be designed for the specific workload intended to be run on the cluster.
Enabling vSAN
Enabling vSAN creates a vSAN datastore and registers the vSAN storage provider. The vSAN storage provider communicates the storage capabilities of the datastore to vCenter Server. Currently, there are no third-party storage providers.
To enable vSAN on an existing cluster:
- Open the vSphere Web Client.
- Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
- Select the cluster on which you want to enable vSAN.
- Click the Configure tab.
- Under vSAN, select Services, click Turn on vSAN, and then follow the wizard.
- Click OK.
Disabling vSAN
Warning: When you disable the vSAN cluster, all virtual machines located on the shared vSAN datastore become inaccessible. If you intend to use a virtual machine while vSAN is disabled, make sure you migrate virtual machines from vSAN datastore to another datastore before disabling the vSAN cluster.
Note for stretched clusters (including 2-node), please disable the stretch and remove the witness per our documentation prior to the steps below.To disable vSAN on the cluster:
- Open the vSphere Web Client.
- Click the Hosts and Clusters tab.
- Select the cluster on which you want to disable vSAN.
- Click the Configure tab.
- Under vSAN, select Services and click Turn off vSAN.
- Click OK.