Last month VMware released vSAN version 6.6 as a patch release of vSphere (6.5.0d). New features included Data-at-Rest encryption, enhanced stretched clusters with local protection, change of vSAN communication from multicast to unicast and many more.
Perhaps al ittle less impressive but yet very useful change is the (simple) way a new vSAN cluster is configured. To illustrate this I have recorded a short demo of the configuration of a new vSAN 6.6 cluster.
I chose a deployment with 2 ESXi hosts (aka a ROBO deployment) which requires a witness host. In the demo environment I used in the video a witness appliance was already deployed. Also a cluster object was already created which contains the two ESXi hosts.
The demo starts with the network configuration which is required to use vSAN. This means a new vmkernel port is created and dedicated vmnics are assigned to make sure the vSAN communications is physically separated from other network traffic (which is a best practice). The actual vSAN cluster configuration starts at 5:39 into the video (which is 7:48 total in length).