VCF 5.1 supports the ability to deploy a VI WLD with external storage as principal storage with no VxRail managed vSAN. This feature allows support for a VxRail dynamic node cluster with three nodes or more to be added to a VI WLD. VCF 5.1 SDDC Manager allows 2-node clusters when using vLCM and connecting to external storage as primary. These nodes contain no internal storage disks normally required for vSAN.

Requirements

The following requirements must be met before deploying a VxRail dynamic node cluster with FC storage as principal storage.

Supported storage arrays:

• PowerStore
• PowerMax
• Unity XT

Supported FC HBAs:

• Emulex LPE 35002 Dual Port 32 Gb HBA
• Emulex LPE 31002 Dual Port 16 Gb HBA
• QLogic 2772 Dual Port 32 Gb HBA
• QLogic 2692 Dual Port 16 Gb HBA

Storage configuration required:

• Zoning of the VxRail nodes to the storage system
• Creation and masking of the LUN to the VxRail nodes
• 900 GB of free space on the volume
• Formatting the LUN with a Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)

If multiple datastores are discovered during VxRail Day 1 workflow, the largest one will be selected as the primary datastore for the VxRail systems.

If multiple datastores are discovered of the same size, a random one will be selected during VxRail Day 1 workflow.