Deploy the StarWind Virtual SAN virtual appliance on VMware vSphere 6.7

10. Create a VMware cluster

10.1. Create the VMware cluster

To create a cluster on VMware vSphere, select the data center where your VMware ESXi hosts are located and click: Actions -> New Cluster.

Provide a name for this cluster and click OK.
In our case, we named it "SW_Cluster".

10.2. Stop the VMs to be integrated into the VMware cluster

To add a VMware ESXi host to a VMware cluster, its virtual machines must be powered off.
We will therefore start with our 2nd host where there is a single StarWind virtual machine (which we can therefore temporarily turn off).
In our case, we will also turn off the 2nd StarWind virtual machine.

Optional virtual machines are powered off.

Note that you cannot shut down the "VCSA" VM since you need the "VMware vSphere Client" (found there) to add the corresponding VMwar ESXi host to your VMware cluster.

10.3. Add the 2nd VMware ESXi host to your cluster

To begin, we will add our 2nd VMware ESXi host to our cluster.
Because VCSA is hosted in our case on our first VMware ESXi host.

To do this, select your "SW_Cluster" cluster and click: Actions -> Add Hosts.

In the "Add hosts" wizard, go to the "Existing hosts" tab and check only your 2nd host.
In other words, the host where there is no "VCSA" VM.

Indeed, as indicated by the wizard, the selected hosts will be placed in maintenance mode (which implies the shutdown of all the VMs located there).

Information about the selected host appears.
Click Next.

Confirm adding the host to your VMware cluster by clicking Finish.

As you can see, the host you just added to your VMware cluster is in maintenance mode.

Once the host is added to your cluster, you can take it out of maintenance mode.
To do this, select your VMware ESXi host and click: Actions -> Maintenance Mode -> Exit Maintenance Mode.

10.4. Migrate the VCSA VM to a VMware cluster member host

As explained previously, to add a host to a VMware cluster, it must be placed in maintenance mode by the wizard.
Which involves shutting down all virtual machines present on this host or migrating the VMs to another host.
Since the VCSA VM cannot be shut down (since you need it to use the VMware vSphere Client), you will need to migrate this VM to a host already added to your VMware cluster.

To do this, select your VCSA virtual machine and click: Actions -> Migrate.

Select "Change both compute resource and storage" to migrate the files and execution of this virtual machine.
Indeed, in our case, it is stored on a datastore local to our host "esxi1".

Select the host that you have already added to your VMware cluster.
In our case: esxi2.

Wait while your VCSA virtual machine is migrated.

The virtual machine has been migrated to the host that is already a member of your VMware cluster.