Journey to vSAN – A Technical Adventure

[NetworkNerd]

Imagine having just configured some LUNs on your new PowerVault MD3820i. Encryption key management has been configured, and 20 SEDs (self-encrypting drives) are spinning and ready for use with vSphere. There are 4 SSDs in the PowerVault to use for caching that just need to be configured.

“What do you mean these cache disks aren’t supported for use with SEDs?” That was the question posed to Dell Support after being told we could not add cache disks for our SED LUNs in this array.

The SSDs were in the PowerVault, and the device recognized them without an issue. We just couldn’t configure them as cache. Even the documentation from Dell mentioned this configuration is not supported. As it turns out, the SSDs we received were not SEDs and could not be used as cache in combination with SEDs.

While the SAN with SEDs would meet the corporate encryption requirements, losing caching capabilities meant the storage would no longer meet our IOPs needs. And that is where our story begins.

You can read the rest here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2018/01/28/journey-to-vsan-a-technical-adventure.