VSAN on Ravello

First off I would like to thank Ravello for making this happen.  As being part of the vExpert Community Ravello has give us free use of their services.  Which allows me to design and build Software Defined Data Centers all in the cloud running on AWS, Google or Oracle.  I would also like to thank VMware for their vExpert program.  Because of this I have licenses to be able to setup all these labs and grow my knowledge.

This article is going to be a high level overview of setting up VSAN on Ravello.  In future articles I will go deeper into how to actually set it all up.

For this design I was wanting to setup a Proof of Concept for VSAN.  I had only used Ravello a few times so I was not exactly sure how to use Ravello to accomplish what I wanted.  My Design consisted of 5 instances on Ravello.

1. Domain Controller using Server 2012 and DNS.
2. 3 ESXi Host each one configured with a 100gb drive for VSAN cache and a 1TB drive for data.  With VSAN your cache drive should be 10% of the total datastore.  So if you have 3 host each with 1TB then the cache should be 100gb.  If you turn on FTT of 1 (RAID 1) or mirroring you will lose half your storage so 1.5tb usuable.
3. A jump VM running Windows 7 for RDP from my home computer.
4. vCenter

First came the network design.  I wanted to seperate out the traffic for each layer of networking.

1. Management – Traffic for the ESX host itself.
2. Data/VM – Traffic for running VM’s
3. Storage – Traffic for VSAN
4. vMotion- vMotion Traffic

Now its time to build everything.

1. Setup Domain Controller
2. Add each ESX host to domain
3. Add the jump VM to the domain
4. Deploy vCenter  and join domain

Deploying vCenter on Ravello can be tricky.  Ravello is essential virtualization on top of virtualization.  I am running an ESX host on top of Ravello virtualization, which is a layer of virtualization running on top of AWS or Google.  They are also running a layer of virtualization on top of there physical hardware.  I had some issues trying to get the appliance to work with Ravello.  For now I will have to stick with the Windows version.

Notice from the above image the yellow signs.  They are there because there is not any shared storage and HA will not work.  You must also turn off HA before you can enable VSAN. Now that I have setup all 5 of my instances and applied all the networking settings it is not time to deploy it.  It takes about 10-15 minutes to get all the instances up and running. Now come the cool part of setting up VSAN.

1. Setup the VMKernel port on your vswitch for each host.  Make sure to check the VSAN setting and use the same name.
2. Go to each host and mark the cache disk ad SSD.  This will allow the host to use is for cache.
3. Right click on the cluster and enable VSAN and choose manual mode for adding disk.
4. Now claim the disk.
5. VSAN is now Setup!!!!

Notice now the yellow icons are gone?   Now the host have shared storage, and can utilize HA.

Sometime soon I plan on building up a SDDC lab on ravello.  This will use most of the VMware products and utilize Veeam for backup.  Thanks for reading and leave a comment if you have any questions.