In a previous blog, I performed a Commission of 3 ESXi hosts, see Commission VCF ESXi hosts in SDDC Manager – Bulk Import w/ JSON – Sargon Khizeran and for the following steps, I will use those 3 hosts to deploy an additional vSAN cluster in my Management domain.
From SDDC Manager under Workload Domains, locate the Management Domain, click on the ellipses, and select ‘Add Cluster’
Because my hosts were configured and added for vSAN storage, selecting vSAN only.
Name the cluster and I will be using a pre-selected image to manage the cluster via vLCM.
Keeping this as a vSAN HCI cluster and the Failures to Tolerate is only 1, this is only 3 node cluster.
For Host Selection, I have only 3 in an Unassigned state so I will select all 3 and continue
For the Switch Configuration, there are several options depending on the physical network interface ports available on the host, features, redundancy, and how everything may be segmented on your network. You can configure some pre-defined switch configurations and there is a custom option as well.
For homelab and simplicity reasons, selecting ‘Default’ and have all traffic use 10GB links coming out of the host. There is also the yellow banner that requires vLANs to be entered, click ‘Edit’
The MTU for the majority of the traffic will be pre-determined and cannot be changed such as Management traffic being 1500 MTU and vSAN being at 9000, however, we do need to specify the VLAN for our NSX overlay for Host TEPs. Input it in the field, click ‘Save Changes’ and then Next.
Once you click ‘Save Changes’ it will prompt to ‘Acknowledge’ before clicking Next.
The next step to License can be Now or Later. I’m going with Later
At the final step for ‘Review’, check all the information and click ‘Finish’
Monitor the Tasks and respective Subtasks
When selecting ‘Task Info’ you will find the ‘CLUSTER_CREATION’
While monitoring the vSphere Client, the new cluster was configured and hosts started to get added
There is my newly created cluster in vSphere
We can log into our NSX Manager and monitor the NSX preparation of our hosts
Once everything is completed, if you jump back to the SDDC Manager >> Workload Domains >> select Management domain and locate the Clusters tab
It’s slightly different in the video, feel free to check out.
