Alright, sorry for the long title, but after a crazy last two months, I’ve finally gotten around to a homelab rebuild and needed to give the physical deployment another shot.
This time I wanted to use our very own William Lam’s vSAN ESA hardware mock VIB for physical ESXi deployment for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Now, William has already done the work, so I hit up the referenced GitHub for William. Downloaded the Pre-Built VIB ‘nested-vsan-esa-mock-hw.vib’
Using WinSCP, I uploaded the vib into the ‘/tmp’ directory on each host. Access the hosts via SSH and ran the following commands (in listed order) as instructed in Lam’s instructions.
esxcli software acceptance set --level CommunitySupported
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/nested-vsan-esa-mock-hw.vib --no-sig-check
/etc/init.d/vsanmgmtd restart
Now that everything is ready on the hosts, I went to my VCF deployment parameter spreadsheet and configured the vSphere Datastore section under ‘Deploy Parameters’. I selected Yes to both Dedup and Compression as well as ESA. I have all NVMe storage in these boxes.
The Validate Configuration passed with all Success, this was a first time I made it through the vSAN HCL and ESA checks and I was just hoping everything else was going smooth, (I had also had to relocate my homelab into a new home and re-do my networking..and thankfully was able to restore lots of my settings.
Checking out the Management Domain and we found vSAN ESA is showing
Of the 8TB of raw physical storage, we have about 6.4TB available
What I really should be doing next is working to automate this or at least create an ESXi image with the vib and Community Supported flag in place.
Big thanks to William Lam and the community for continuously building and sharing.
