Considerations while using traditional datastores with vSAN

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provided details that need to be considered while using traditional VMFS/vVOL/NFS datastores with vSAN

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi

VMware vSAN

Resolution

• The backing devices used for VMFS cannot be used for vSAN and vice versa
• It is recommended to create a different VMkernel port only for vMotion to avoid a performance impact on the Management Network
• While relocating VMs between the different types of datastores, please ensure that the correct & supported Storage Policy is selected for the VMDKs especially when the virtual disks are from vSAN and non-VSAN datastores
• To run VMs on non-vSAN datastores, you need to ensure that the storage controller used for vSAN disks is NOT used for non-vSAN disks
• Please follow the below guidelines when using the same storage controller for vSAN and non-vSAN disks for local datastores

Best practices when using vSAN and non-vSAN disks with the same storage controller

Additional Information

Deployment guidelines for running VMware vSAN and VMware vSphere VMFS datastores on a Dell H730 controller with the lsi_mr3 driver