Late last year, I made the decision to obtain the vSAN Specialist badge (2VB-601) that VMware just recently began offering. While I currently don’t have the necessary home lab equipment, I plan to get started and then figure out the lab situation. My ideal plan is to have a three node NUC cluster running vSAN, but this may change. Regardless, the most important thing is to start, so here we go!
This will be a study guide/exam guide for those interested in becoming a vSAN Specialist. It will also serve as a general guide to deploying and using vSAN. Throughout this process, I hope to obtain my badge, deep dive with vSAN, and help others along the way. The exam, 2VB-601, is a badge which validates your knowledge of vSAN. It is very characteristic of current VCP exams; however, it is not considered a VCP exam. Also, you must have at least one VCP exam already. Since I obtained my first VCP-DCV6 last year, I thought this would be the perfect compliment. So, here we go!
Why vSAN? Traditional datacenter infrastructure is continuing to change at warp speed, and because of this, infrastructure must evolve in order to meet the needs of the customer. Two main factors are at play, costs and time to market. vSAN addresses both of these perfectly within the world’s most popular virtualization platform. The days of massive storage arrays and complicated setups/upgrades are quickly fading; rather, the days of building out your solution brick by brick (saves money) and converged core technologies (compute, storage, network) are taking its place.
vSAN continues to be a major disruptor within the Hyper Converged space. Currently VMware is the market leader within the space, with about 10,000 customers actively using vSAN now (this continues to grow each day). So with that said, vSAN will continue to evolve and become more popular. Ready to learn with me? Excited? Well let’s begin.
With all things VMware, the TRUTH always persists within the official exam guide/blueprint. It can be found here. In closing, here are the objectives that will be covered during this process. This is going to be a long journey, but I look forward to learning more about vSAN and helping others along the way!
Section 1- Storage Fundamentals
Objective 1.1 – Identify storage device characteristics
Objective 1.2 – Identify storage performance factors
Section 2 – VSAN Fundamentals
Objective 2.1 – Provide a high-level description of vSAN
Objective 2.2 – Describe vSAN requirements
Objective 2.3 – Understand how vSAN stores and protects data
Objective 2.4 – Describe vSAN space efficiency features
Section 3 – vSAN Configuration
Objective 3.1 – Identify physical network requirements
Objective 3.2 – Configure vSAN networking
Objective 3.3 – Configure a vSAN cluster
Objective 3.4 – Create and manage disk groups
Objective 3.5 – Validate a vSAN configuration
Section 4 – vSAN Policies and Virtual Machines
Objective 4.1 – Explain how storage policies work
Objective 4.2 – Create and manage storage policies
Objective 4.3 – Explain how storage policies are applied to virtual machines
Objective 4.4 – Check storage policy compliance
Objective 4.5 – Describe vsanSparse snapshots
Section 5 – Managing and Operating vSAN
Objective 5.1 – Configure vSAN encryption
Objective 5.2 – Understand various failure events and how vSAN responds
Objective 5.3 – Describe maintenance mode options
Objective 5.4 – Manage hardware replacement
Objective 5.5 – Describe iSCSI Target service
Section 6 – Stretched Clusters and Two-Node Clusters
Objective 6.1 – Describe a stretched cluster architecture
Objective 6.2 – Create a stretched cluster
Objective 6.3 – Understand data placement in a stretched cluster
Objective 6.4 – Describe the two-node cluster architecture
Section 7 – Monitoring and Troubleshooting vSAN
Objective 7.1 – Understand hardware failure scenarios
Objective 7.2 – Interpret vSAN Health in the vSphere Web Client
Objective 7.3 – Access performance information in the UI and using CLI
Objective 7.4 – Access capacity management information
Section 8 – Interoperability with vSphere Features
Objective 8.1 – Identify vSphere features that work with vSAN
Objective 8.2 – Understand vSAN compatibility with SRM
Objective 8.3 – Describe 3rd-party solution integration with vSAN
Objective 8.4 – Understand vSAN compatibility with Horizon
Section 9 – Designing a vSAN Deployment
Objective 9.1 – Understand vSAN design considerations
Objective 9.2 – Understand vSAN cache tier sizing
Objective 9.3 – Design a vSAN cluster
Objective 9.4 – Identify vSAN design and sizing tools
TheVirtualBoi 