Installing VMware vSAN: A Practical Guide
Setting up VMware vSAN isn’t complicated once you understand what it’s doing. At its core, vSAN turns the local storage of your ESXi hosts into a shared storage pool — so your virtual machines can use it just like a traditional SAN, but without the external hardware.
If you already have a vSphere environment running, installing vSAN is really just about enabling and configuring it correctly.
Step 1: Check the Basics
Before you start, make sure your environment meets the essentials:
- Three or more ESXi hosts (that’s the minimum for redundancy).
- A supported vCenter Server version — manage everything from there.
- Enough local disks on each host: one for cache and at least one for capacity.
- A dedicated network for vSAN traffic, ideally on a 10Gbps interface.
These basics matter. If you skip them, you’ll run into issues later.
Step 2: Enable vSAN in vCenter
Log into the vSphere Client and head to your cluster.
Click Configure → vSAN → Services → Configure.
You’ll get a few setup options:
- Single site cluster — the standard setup.
- Two-node cluster — for smaller or edge setups.
- Stretched cluster — if you’re spanning across sites for high availability.
For most lab or production environments, the single-site cluster is fine.
Step 3: Add Disks to the vSAN Cluster
Each ESXi host contributes storage to the cluster.
You’ll divide your disks into two types:
- Cache tier: SSDs used for performance.
- Capacity tier: SSDs or HDDs that store the actual data.
Once vSAN is enabled, vCenter will guide you through selecting which disks to claim for each tier.
Step 4: Configure Networking
vSAN traffic needs its own network.
Create a VMkernel adapter on each host and enable the vSAN service on it.
Make sure every host can ping the others over that network — if not, fix that before going further.
Step 5: Check Health and Validate
After setup, go to vSAN → Health in vCenter.
Run the health check. It’ll verify connectivity, disk groups, and cluster status.
If everything’s green, your vSAN cluster is ready.
You can now start creating datastores and deploying VMs on the shared vSAN storage.
Step 6: (Optional) Fine-Tune
Once it’s up, you might want to explore a few extras:
- Deduplication and compression to save space.
- Encryption for data-at-rest security.
- Storage policies to control performance and redundancy per VM.
These aren’t must-haves for a basic setup, but they make a difference in production.
Wrapping Up
Installing VMware vSAN isn’t about memorizing every setting — it’s about understanding how the pieces fit together: compute, storage, and network. Once those are aligned, the actual installation is pretty straightforward.
You end up with shared storage that’s fast, scalable, and built right into your existing infrastructure — no external SAN required.
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