Update:While my original plan of creating a VSAN datastore with just a single host worked, once I moved over subsequent VMs I experienced several issues. This is not a huge surprise, VMware recommends three hosts. Even in a lab I’d encourage you to have multiple hosts.
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I’ve just begun to check out VMware’s VSAN in the home lab and have been trying not only to learn the ins and outs of it, but figure out where it might fit in my home lab. It is going to be a great new offering from VMware and I can see it really helping out a lot of the customers I used to work with doing VDI, DR, and taking advantage of the advanced capabilities of vSphere without traditional shared storage. I’m currently running just a single big host, with everything virtualized within for my home lab. In terms of facilitating these efforts VSAN is potentially going to be a tool to help me out in doing so. With that said any of the following I’m about to speak of is of course entirely unsupported.
Since I have a single host I do want to leverage these capabilities as much as possible but the reality is I do not have the minimum number of nodes for a VSAN(3). I did find however that this is not a hard-set minimum requirement, however keep in mind you are not going to have any redundancy at this point.
What I decided for my home lab was as follows:
• I am going to retain the other 500 GB SSD and 1 TB SATA I have and not put them in the VSAN disk group. Since I am not properly using it I’m not about to take the risk of rebuilding my entire lab, even if I have backups. I’ll continue to put the core infrastructure directly on the data stores that are created on these disks.
• Lastly I am going to create a proper VSAN cluster using virtual esxi hosts and present each of them with virtual disks. These will be stored on separate disks from the VSAN datastore. The cool thing is the hosts can detect the type of physical storage these disks are on and will make them available as such so I should be able to use these hosts for nested virtual machines and still retain the performance benefits of my lab infrastructure.
If you want a bit more detail check out Mike Laverick’s post , which provides some further information on what VSAN is and some advanced settings you can play around with.