vSAN Stretched Cluster requires three independent sites; two data sites and one witness site. If you don’t have a third site, you can run the vSAN Witness Appliance in the cloud. This post will show you how I deployed a vSAN Witness Appliance in Proact Hybrid Cloud (PHC) which runs VMware Cloud Director.
I started with deploying the vSAN Witness Appliance in PHC by selecting Add vApp from OVF.
When prompted to Select Source I browsed to VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness-7.0U3c-19193900.ova which I had already downloaded from VMware. Please make sure you download the version matching your environment, or upgrade it after deployment. I continued through the wizard supplying all the regular details like hostname, IP configuration and so on, and my vApp including the vSAN Witness Appliance VM was deployed.
Next step was to configure VPN between my on-premises lab in Oslo and PHC in Sweden. Both environments run NSX-T which makes it easy, but most third-party hardware routers or VPN gateways that support IPSec is supported. I started with configuring it in PHC by going to Networking, Edge Gateways, and clicking on the name of my Edge Gateway to open the configuration page. I then selected IPSec VPN under Services in the menu and clicked on New to bring up the Add IPSec VPN Tunnel wizard. I provided a name, selected the default security profile, and entered a Pre-Shared Key for the Authentication Mode although using a certificate is also an option. Endpoint Configuration was then configured like this:
Local Endpoint IP Address was set to the public IP assigned to my Edge Gateway in PHC, and Remote Endpoint IP Address was set to the public IP assigned to the firewall in my on-premises lab environment. Since we are using NAT, Remote ID was set to the internal private IP configured on the Local Endpoint. If you are not using NAT, Remote ID should be set to the public IP being used. The 10.10.10.0/24 network is where the vSAN Witness Appliance is running in PHC, and the 192.168.224.0/24 network is where I run the vSAN Nodes in my on-premises lab.
After verifying that the VPN tunnel was working, I was able to add the vSAN Witness Appliance as an ESXi host in my on-premises vCenter:
I configured my vSAN nodes for Witness Traffic Separation so that they would communicate with the witness host via their Management network (vmk0). This removed the need to route the vSAN data network to the Witness site, and since I am using vmk0 I also didn’t need to add any static routes or override the default gateway. When configuring vSAN on the cluster in my on-premises lab, I could simply select the witness host running in PHC:
Checking the Fault Domains configuration on my vSAN Cluster after deployment shows that the witness in PHC is being used by the cluster.
Please don’t forget the importance of making sure that the Preferred site and the Secondary site are connected to the Witness site independently of each other. This means that the Secondary site should not connect to the Witness site via the Preferred site and vice versa. The reason for this is that if you lose one of your data sites, the surviving data site still needs to talk to the witness for the cluster to be operational.
For more information about vSAN Stretched Cluster I recommend reading the vSAN Stretched Cluster Guide.
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