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You are here: Home / Automation / How to bootstrap ESXi compute only node and connect to vSAN HCI Mesh?

How to bootstrap ESXi compute only node and connect to vSAN HCI Mesh?

01.31.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

After documenting the process for bootstrapping vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) using my Intel NUC 12 Pro, I was looking for an easier way to share my physical vSAN storage, which is powered by a single Supermicro E200-8D, to other physical ESXi hosts for testing purposes.

I had recently been playing with the vSAN HCI Mesh feature, which was launched back in 2020, as I was running out of spare NVMe devices when needing to test different physical hardware kits. While my use case for the storage is typically short lived, it means I do not have to play musical chairs with the limited number of NVMe devices I have installed in the various kits I have.

The vSphere UI in vCenter Server already provides a very simple workflow to mount a remote vSAN storage on an ESXi compute-only node, but I was also looking at this from a bootstrapping point of view and what if vCenter Server was not deployed or even available? Could I still make this work? After a bit of trial and error, I was able to figure out this can be accomplished by using a series of ESXCLI commands!

Step 1 - SSH to one of the ESXi hosts which is providing the vSAN OSA storage and run the following ESXCLI command and make a note of the Local Node UUID and Sub-Cluster UUID values:

esxcli vsan cluster list


Next, make a note of both the Datastore UUID and User Friendly Name from running this command:

esxcli vsan datastore list


Step 2 - SSH to the ESXi compute-only host and enable vSAN traffic on one of your VMKernel interfaces by running the following command:

esxcli vsan network ipv4 add -i vmk0

Step 3 - Create a new vSAN OSA cluster that is acting as a compute-only node by running the following command:

esxcli vsan cluster new -c

Once the operation has completed, we can confirm our new ESXi compute-only node by running the following command:

esxcli vsan cluster get


Step 4 - Now, we are going to configure the remote vSAN datastore that we will want to use by running the following command and specifying the Sub-Cluster UUID, Datastore UUID and User Friendly Name that you had obtained from Step 1:

esxcli vsan datastore add -c 52eb3a2d-910c-73da-ed87-7e4e126f9ee3 -u 52eb3a2d-910c-73da-ed87-7e4e126f9ee3 -n sm-vsanDatastore


Step 5 - Finally, we add the address of the unicastagent for our remote vSAN host by running the following command and specifying the IP Address of the remote vSAN ESXi host, Sub-Cluster UUID and Local Node UUID that you had also obtained in Step 1:

esxcli vsan cluster unicastagent add -a 192.168.30.5 -c 52eb3a2d-910c-73da-ed87-7e4e126f9ee3 -t remote -u 5bea83cb-daa3-c09e-af26-ac1f6b752afc


If everything was successfully configured, you should now be able to list the following directory /vmfs/volumes/<User Friendly Name> and you should now see files from your remote vSAN datastore!

More from my site

  • How to bootstrap vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) on unsupported hardware?
  • Enabling vSAN 8 Express Storage Architecture (ESA) using Nested ESXi
  • How to check if your vCenter Server is using vSphere+ / vSAN+ Subscription?
  • Automating subscription and usage retrieval for vSphere+ and vSAN+ Cloud Service
  • Quick Tip - Inventory core count for vSphere+, vSAN+ & VCF+ Cloud Service

Categories // Automation, ESXi, Home Lab, VSAN, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // Express Storage Architecture, HCI Mesh, VSAN, VSAN 8

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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