What is the purpose of the datastores created by NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) during initial deployment?

Applies to

• NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE)

Answer

When deploying a new HCI cluster with NDE, these default datastores are created:
 
NetApp-HCI-Datastore-01
NetApp-HCI-Datastore-02
<user-input>-esx-01-local-datastore-01
<user-input>-esx-02-local-datastore-01

NDE configures datastores that are automatically mapped to all ESXi hosts.

Functions of these datastores:

• The vCenter VCSA and Management Node (mNode) are both deployed to the NetApp-HCI-Datastore-01 datastore

  • Warning: These are both essential to cluster management, so the NetApp-HCI-Datastore-01 should not be deleted.

• The NetApp-HCI-Datastore-02 is available for customer VMs
  • NDE creates two datastores to satisfy the best practice requirement for vSphere.  By default, vSphere picks heartbeat datastores automatically. For more information on heart beating in ESX, see:
    • Datastore heartbeating
    • Configuring datastore heartbeating

Additionally, the local datastores below are created from the leftover capacity on each ESXi host’s boot device. These datastores are on local devices and are not protected by any form of RAID, so NetApp does not recommend using them for storing customer production VMs.
 
<user-input>-esx-01-local-datastore-01
<user-input>-esx-02-local-datastore-01

Additional Information

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