ISE and VMWare vSAN Support

[Arne Bier]

Hi

anyone here deployed ISE on VMWare vSAN (their hyperconverged ESXi)? And on top of that, customer wants to use VMWare ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office) hypervisor. We don’t plan to use the DRS and vMotion etc but I wonder whether the vSAN component is good enough for the demands that ISE places on disk IO

regards

Arne

[Colby LeMaire · Accepted solution]

I deployed ISE on vSAN in the lab.  Not sure if any of my customer deployments were using vSAN.  As long as it was esxi and the installation didn't complain about the disk transfer rates, the topic of what kind of storage never came up.  As with anything, it depends.  You could argue that on-box, hyper-converged storage is much better than an external storage array.  But just as it is with external storage arrays, it comes down to the underlying network connectivity and storage design.  With vSAN, they should have a separate, dedicated physical NIC that is used solely for vSAN.  And a dedicated VLAN that is used just for storage traffic.  If all of that is designed properly and is stable, then I don't see why there would be any issues.  And as I said, it could be better.  vSAN operates within the hypervisor kernel whereas other storage solutions require the use of a service VM.  So there are some efficiencies there.

[Damien Miller · Accepted solution]

I've had no issue with ISE on hyperconverged infrastructure except for a time where someone took too many hosts down for upgrade/patching/maintenance and the disk failed. Following that, 7 of the 8 ISE VM's came back "online" with corrupt disks and required a reinstall. I have many customers running on vsan now and do so without issue.

The only time I have really seen a true issue with disk is when the MNT was running with other VM nodes on a few raid 5 10k drives.