Yeah, I was reading that myself. It looks like on the new product the requirements have changed. Before there was a lot of docs about setting up a 2 node cluster with vStorage acting as the third node.I guess I mis-stated 2 nodes based on their documentation:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-vsphere-high-availability.pdf
VMware KB: FAQ for VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 1.0.x
Further looking through the knowledge base yields this:
- Two ESXi hosts
- A physical Windows or Linux machine capable of running the VSA Cluster Service
- vCenter Server and VSA Manager installed and running on a virtual machine inside one of the two ESXi hosts
- but silly enough the third machine makes it a 3rd node. I get very frustrated with VMWare documentation, because no matter how much I read, I very often cannot predict what a button click will do and the use of terminology is sometimes not standard. Even their best 4 and 5 star docs are a mix of very specific CLI commands with some vague steps thrown in to separate and confuse the reader. I find myself having to personally test each item ahead of implementation on everything, which is very inefficient.
Looking cursorily at the new virtual SAN requirement, I cannot even understand where this product is going. Before it seemed like a clever way to implement a light quorum server, maybe re-purpose an old Windows 98SE box or maybe soon a Windows XP box. If I have to add an SSD on top of each storage array, I might as well just buy a NAS or a SAN at that point. I guess this feature just got tossed off my list of things to test. BTW, I do have a shared storage NAS (NFS) sitting between the 2 ESXi servers.
So I revise my earlier post as follows:
A.
1. Register VMs on local host
2. Join hosts to cluster
3. implement a migration to the new data array
B.
1. Join hosts to the cluster
2/3. migrate data and register machines to cluster in no order of preference
C.
1. Join hosts to cluster
2. register VMs to cluster
3. migrate machines to preferred datastore
Which looks best?