Creating a Fault Domain in vSAN Cluster

In previous blog we discussed about Fault Domains in vSAN Cluster. In this blog, let's have a look at how to create a new fault domain in a vSAN Cluster.

When you deploy a virtual machine on the vSAN Cluster with fault domains, vSAN distributes protection components like witnesses and replicas of the virtual machine objects across different fault domains. As a result, in addition to supporting a single host, storage disk, or network failure, the vSAN environment can now tolerate complete rack failures.

Before you configure fault domain in vSAN make sure the following conditions are satisfied -

1. Choose an unique fault domain name. Duplicate fault domain names are not supported by vSAN in a cluster.

2. Make sure your vSAN hosts are up and running. You cannot assign hosts to a fault domain that is offline or unavailable due to hardware configuration issue.

3. Verify the version of your ESXi hosts. You can only include hosts that are 6.0 or later in fault domains.

Now, lets see how to configure fault domain in vSAN.

1. Navigate to the vSAN cluster.

2. Click the Configure tab.

3. Under vSAN, click Fault Domains.

4. Click the plus icon. The New Fault Domain wizard opens.

5. Enter the fault domain name.

6. Select one or more hosts to add to the fault domain.

A fault domain cannot be empty. You must select at least one host to include in the fault domain.

7. Click CREATE.

The selected hosts appear in the fault domain. Each fault domain displays the used and reserved

capacity information. This enables you to view the capacity distribution across the fault domain.

So this way you can easily create a Fault Domain in vSAN in few clicks.

Once the fault domain has been created, you can simply drag a new host into an existing fault domain to add it there.

Likewise, if you want to take any host out of the fault domain, you can just drag that host from the fault domain to the standalone hosts area. Once the host is moved out of fault domain it is considered to reside in it's own single-host fault domain.

Thank you for reading!

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