Create a vSAN ESA-Enabled Cluster

Starting from VMware PowerCLI 13.0.0 and vSAN 8.0, you can activate vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) and manage storage pools on your clusters.

Starting from VMware PowerCLI 13.0.0 and vSAN 8.0, you can use vSAN ESA and the new storage format called storage pool disks. With vSAN ESA, you can boost performance with more predictable I/O latencies and optimized space efficiency. Each host that contributes storage contains a single storage pool of flash devices. Each flash device provides both caching and capacity to the vSAN ESA cluster. This is different from a disk group, which has dedicated devices in different tiers of cache and capacity.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that you are connected to a vCenter Server 8.0 or later system.
  • Verify that you have access to at least three virtual machine hosts.
  • Verify that each of the virtual machine hosts has at least one SSD.

Procedure

  1. Create a vSAN ESA-enabled cluster. 
    $vsanEsaCluster = New-Cluster -Name 'VsanESACluster' -Location (Get-Datacenter <MyDatacenter>) -VsanEnabled -VsanEsaEnabled
  2. Retrieve the available storage pool disks to claim on your cluster.
    Get-VsanEsaEligibleDisk -Cluster $vsanEsaCluster
    The system returns the ScsiLun type of the available storage pool disks.
  3. Add disks to the storage pool on the specified host.
    For DiskCanonicalName, use the canonical name from ScsiLun.
    Add-VsanStoragePoolDisk -VMHost (Get-VMHost <MyVMHost>) -VsanStoragePoolDiskType "singleTier" -DiskCanonicalName ("mpx.vmhba0:C0:T11:L0","mpx.vmhba0:C0:T12:L0")
  4. (Optional) You can remove a storage pool disk from the specified host. 
    $disks = Get-VsanStoragePoolDisk -VMHost <MyVMHost>
Remove-VsanStoragePoolDisk -VsanStoragePoolDisk $disks -VsanDataMigrationMode "nodatamigration" -Purpose "test" -Confirm:$false