Now that the vCenter is deployed on the single node vSAN, it is time to focus on how to add the hosts into the vCenter and setup the vSAN in a proper working way. If you missed the first part of this, you can find it here.
Witness
First I want to deploy the vSAN witness. I need this because I will only have a 2-node vSAN.
The Witness node is downloaded under support.broadcom.com in the vSAN section.
You have to deploy the witness in a different site because it acts as a witness host and you would want to avoid split brain scenarios.
1: It is an OVA file so you deploy it as a ova.
2: Next you select a compute resource and a location.
3: There are some specific settings that can pose issues for some orgs. Also the certificate is expired. You should click to ignore that problem.
4: Accept the EULA
5: Select the sizing. Depending on the size of your environment you may select tiny but I will go with medium.
6: Next you select storage, I tend to go with thin provision for this as it just handles the heartbeat between the nodes. Anyway this can be changed afterwards by doing a storage vMotion.
7: Networks, since this is the Witness and on a different site, I go with the same VLAN.
8: In this page we do most of the settings of the Witness appliance. We also select which vNIC is used for vSAN traffic, in my case the secondary nic.
9: Check that all parameters are correct and click finish to deploy the Witness node.
Post deployment I disabled IPv6 for now since I don’t intend to use it for the lab. This requires a reboot as normal with a ESX host.
We now have the witness setup and we need to check that we can reach it from the vCenter and from the ESX hosts.
First checking from the Witness network:
Checking from vCenter and ESX vSAN hosts to the Witness:
Now to verify connectivity from the Witness to the vCenter and ESX Hosts:
Traffic works the other way too. Now the third part can be done which is adding the esx hosts into the vCenter.