vSAN 8 ESA on Minisforum MS-01

To install the new vSAN 8 ESA (Express Storage Architecture) on Minisforum MS-01, it is required to have NVMe disks only as internal storage in the hosts.

Checking the hardware compatibility of Minisforum MS-01 used as hypervisor, prerequisites are not 100% met (it complains about NVMe disks) but enough to finalize the installation.

Prerequisites

For this deployment, three Minisforum MS-01 with CPU i9-12900H and 64GB RAM per node have been used.

Before turning on vSAN 8 ESA, make sure your Physical adapters are properly connected.

In the Distributed Switch (or Virtual Switch) configure a dedicated vSAN portgroup to handle vSAN traffic. The vSAN traffic uses the 10 Gbit/s NIC provided by the Minisforum MS-01.

Turn on vSAN 8 ESA on Minisforum MS-01

To configure vSAN 8 ESA, you need to first select the vSphere cluster then go to Configure > vSAN > Services section. Keep in mind if HA is enabled, vSAN cannot be turned on. Click Go to HA Settings link to disable the service.

When the HA service is disabled, vSAN can be turned on.

vSAN provides multiple deployment options:

• vSAN HCI - this is the traditional deployment where compute and storage resources are aggregated in the same hosts that comprise the vSAN HCI cluster.
• vSAN Compute Cluster - this topology (formerly referred to as HCI Mesh) provides compute resources only to vSAN Max clusters in the same data center and from remote vCenters.
• vSAN Max - this topology provides storage resources only (not compute resources) to one or more vSphere clusters in the same data center and from remote vCenters.

From Configure > vSAN > Services section, select vSAN HCI as configuration type and Single site vSAN cluster as topology (you need at least three nodes available for this configuration). Click Configure.

Enable the vSAN ESA switch to leverage vSAN 8 ESA capabilities and click Next.

If vSAN encryption is not a requirement, click Next.

Detected NVMe disks are listed as incompatible since they are not in the HCL (this is a lab environment). Manually claim the disks. When NVMe disks have been claimed, click Next to continue with the configuration.

If you don't need to define fault domains, click Next.

Click Finish to turn on vSAN 8 ESA.

The cluster is being created.

You can check the process status in the Recent Tasks section.

After a few minutes, the vSAN is configured successfully.

Also the Skyline Health is almost perfect.

There is only a warning related to unsupported NVMe disks, but that’s to be expected. You can safely click Silence Alert.

vSAN 8 ESA is now configured in the VMware environment. Remember to re-enable the HA service.