Unsolved
8 Posts
0
1404
Can a VxRail appliance be considered a vSAN Ready node and used as such?
Hi,
Can a VxRail appliance be considered a vSAN Ready node and used as such?
Looking at a VxRail V570, the BIOS says it's a R740xd system (mother board). The Chassis type says it's a VxRail V570 chassis. So when I take the hardware, install a correct version of the firmware, install plain VMware software and add it to an existing vSAN cluster (or build a new one) it will work fine I guess. But is this supported by VMware? In other words does VMware either check the name of the mother board or the name of the chassis?
Thanks in advance, Cor
DELL-Sam L
Moderator
Moderator
•
7.1K Posts
0
June 3rd, 2021 15:00
Hello Cor.Onderwater,
No it can’t be used as a ready node the way it is configured and deployed from Dell. Now if your system is not under warranty and you are wanting to repurpose the hardware, then you could make it into a ready node.
tstonemadisoncollege
14 Posts
0
June 4th, 2021 11:00
That is because of a Windows disk setting for SAN type disks. It views vSAN disks the same as a SAN disk off of a NetApp or Isolon system. Microsoft in their wisdom decided to make disks default to Offline Shared which causes nothing but problems with Always On clusters.
Login to the Windows server as an administrator level account and open a command prompt.
Execute diskpart.exe
Type SAN while in the diskpart utility and look at the SAN disk policy. It probably shows as Offline Shared. Change that to Online All by typing san policy=OnlineAll.
Run the SAN command again to see that the change is in place.
Type List Disk to list all of the disks and their status.
Select any disk that is offline by typing Select Disk 2 or whatever it happens to be.
Now type attributes disk clear readonly
Confirm the settings by typing attributes disk. You will see several stats. One of them is clustered. Ignore that because it is only for the older shared disk type of clustering. Always On is completely different.
Bring the disk on line by typing online disk
It should go on line immediately and show up as available. It will stay available after a reboot now.
Good luck.
Tom
Cor.Onderwater
8 Posts
0
June 9th, 2021 14:00
Hi Dell-SAM L,
Thanks for your reply.
As a test I wiped all disks (including boot disk and IDSDM of a VxRail node. Next I installed ESXi. That runs fine (as expected). However ESXi reports that the server is a VxRail V570. The name of the VxRail V570 is not on the vSAN HCL. So I expect that I (formally) cannot get support for ESXi problems from VmWare. It is possible to change the chassis name in the BIOS to R740xd, but I think that Dell EMC will concider that as unacceptable. So VxRail hardware, a standard PowerEdge (e.g. a R740xd) cannot be repurposed other than as VxRail.
DELL-Sam L
Moderator
Moderator
•
7.1K Posts
0
June 9th, 2021 16:00
Hello Cor.Onderwater,
That is correct that if you are wanting the system to be supported it will not be. Now that doesn’t mean that you still can’t make the changes that you are wanting but you will have to troubleshoot all issues on your own.