VSAN Wont see allow SSDs

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alex1002

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Apr 9, 2013
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Good Day,
I am testing VSAN on a 4 Node SUperMicro all are certified. Purchased the correct controllers also. The controllers I tested with are SAS9207-8i. All drives are seen by the controller and also seen on the actual host. But when I try to setup VSAN it only see 4/6 on one host and 3/6 on the other. The SSDs are all identical. Can anyone advice?

Thank you
 

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IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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Good Day,
I am testing VSAN on two Dell R710 both are certified mostly. The controllers I tested with are SAS9207-8i. All drives are seen by the controller and also seen on the actual host. But when I try to setup VSAN it only see 4/6 on one host and 3/6 on the other. The SSDs are all identical. Can anyone advice?
Thank you
Have you tried cleaning any residual partitions off the drives? If there are partitions on there often times VSAN won't let you add them.

My VSAN journey - Part 2 - How-to delete partitions to prepare disks for VSAN if the disks aren't clean - ESX Virtualization
 
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alex1002

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Capture2.JPG View attachment 4622 The disks are brandnew. Sorry I quickly pulled the drives today and tried them on a 4 Node SuperMicro Server. Same issues. This server was purchased preconfigured to support VSAN. only thing I didnt get from them is the SSDs.
Here we node by node. that all 6 drives are present.
 

IamSpartacus

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I would identify the disks that aren't showing up as available in the vSAN disk management screen and then try moving the disks around between nodes to see if they show up as available in any. Might be an issue with certain disks even though they are brand new and show up in devices.

Also, I'm assuming you have vSAN licensing assigned in vCenter correct?
 
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alex1002

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Right Now I am still testing to I am using trial VSAN Licence from VMWARE. Would this affect anything?
 

IamSpartacus

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Right Now I am still testing to I am using trial VSAN Licence from VMWARE. Would this affect anything?
Trial VSAN license? I've never used one nor was I aware they hand out trial VSAN keys so I'm not sure if there are any limitations. I just know that if you don't apply a VSAN license to your cluster you add/create disk groups.
 

vBuild2BAU

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View attachment 4623 View attachment 4622 The disks are brandnew. Sorry I quickly pulled the drives today and tried them on a 4 Node SuperMicro Server. Same issues. This server was purchased preconfigured to support VSAN. only thing I didnt get from them is the SSDs.
Here we node by node. that all 6 drives are present.
So you can see all 6 drives under devices. But you can't claim all 6 when you go to add them to vSAN is that correct?

Can you please follow the link IamSpartacus provided and see if there are partitions on the SSDs.

My VSAN journey - Part 2 - How-to delete partitions to prepare disks for VSAN if the disks aren't clean - ESX Virtualization
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Good Day,
I am testing VSAN on a 4 Node SUperMicro all are certified. Purchased the correct controllers also. The controllers I tested with are SAS9207-8i. All drives are seen by the controller and also seen on the actual host. But when I try to setup VSAN it only see 4/6 on one host and 3/6 on the other. The SSDs are all identical. Can anyone advice?

Thank you
partedUtil is your friend else apply a license (I as well forget if ANY vSAN functionality is included w/ vSphere in trial mode)

Let me know if you need more info or have this resolved.

EDIT: Yep you need a license. From VMware KB.

Licensing for vSAN
When you enable vSAN on a cluster, assign the cluster an appropriate vSAN license before the 60-day evaluation period expires.

Pretty sure you can still request a trial lic for vSAN though.

Now selling my vSAN license since I de-commed that for my CEPH cluster...TOTALLY j/k :-D
 
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i386

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It's possible to enable vsan through the cli without a vsan license, but this would violate the EULA.
 

IamSpartacus

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It's possible to enable vsan through the cli without a vsan license, but this would violate the EULA.
You can enable vSAN in the web client without a license without issue. The issue is when you want to claim disks/create disk groups. That's when you need a license. And without disk groups, vSAN is a useless feature.
 

alex1002

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I finally managed to get VSAN to all the disks. Now I got an issues. ONe of the Nodes in the cluster keeps on going to network partition 2 and drops back to 1 every 2-3 minutes..

Capture.JPG
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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So what did you do to fix the visibility issue?

And re partitioning - I assume you have double checked your vmk's, mtu's and your multicast addresses, can vmkping all around, are on the latest patch etc?
 
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alex1002

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So what did you do to fix the visibility issue?

And re partitioning - I assume you have double checked your vmk's, mtu's and your multicast addresses, can vmkping all around, are on the latest patch etc?
I used Windows boot DVD and used diskpart to clean each SSD and it seems to see them. This makes me wonder why because these ssds were sealed brand-new.

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