Storage for FT secondary VM?

[Spazzt]

Hi,
I got a setup of 2 ESXi5 hosts and an seperate vSphere vCenter Server running on a Windows 2008R2 host. The 2 ESXi hosts were configured as HA in the vCenter Server and I also configured a storagecluster with 2 iSCSI targets (Openfiler1 and Openfiler2).

In this HA Cluster I got a VM running and its files were stored in the cluster on Openfiler1.

Now I turned FT on for this VM and it created a secondary VM, but on the same storage (Openfiler1). I tested this setup and FT worked very well if I randomly shut down one of my 2 ESXi servers, BUT what will happen if my Openfiler1 storage goes down? Excatly, nothing, VM dead.

The way I thought FT would work is that it would creat the secondary VM in the Cluster on Openfiler2, so that if Openfiler1 goes down the ESXi servers still can use the VM on Openfiler2 and vice versa. Besides it would still work if one of the ESXi servers would go down, too.

So I hope somebody could clear me up on this, and explain how storageclusters work in VMWare and how i configure my above explanation. Cause otherwise it just don't make sens that a secondary VM is stored in the same location as the primary is. This would not end up in a redundant storage of the cluster...

Thanks in advice, Albeck.

[JustMe]

VMware ESXi does not care (too much) for datastore redundancy. We had this discussion lately in this forum.

ESXi provides for the management of redundant pathes to the storage, but not for the storage itself (besides the Storage Appliance solution released by VMware 'lately').

It's up to the administrator of the storage environment to provide for redundancy and continued availability in case that something hickups there.

Please also note that ESXi provides Storage DRS, not Storage HA.

[UrsDerBär]

Actually only Xen with Marathon can do what you want. And this pretty well. Local or SAN-Storage, whatever you want. Also with Multiple CPU's.

[Spazzt]

From another discussion i got a few workarounds for this problem. Of course it would be the best option to get an enterprise storage system but for those who can't afford this, here are a few thoughts about that:

First:
"They'd recommend using SRM, which makes use of SAN replication (like that provided by EMC, HP, NetApp, etc) to replicate the VMs, and in case of a disaster boot those VMs in the DR location.

As of vSphere 5, however, you'll be able to do this without SAN replication for a couple VMs only using vSphere 5's Host Based Replication.

Again, these solutions are more like HA than FT - the VM DOES experience a hard reboot duringe failure."

Well ok, I will have a look at "Site Recoerys Manager", but it says I don't really need it when using vSphere5 because it has build in host based replication. So how and where do I configure this host based replication?

Second:
"ESXi provides for the management of redundant pathes to the storage, but not for the storage itself (besides the Storage Appliance solution released by VMware 'lately')."

I also will have a look at this Storage Application Solution. Any thoughts about this and how it could work?

Thanks so far, Albeck.

[irix]

..
Well ok, I will have a look at "Site Recoerys Manager", but it says I don't really need it when using vSphere5 because it has build in host based replication. So how and where do I configure this host based replication?

Technical every ESXi 5.0 Host contains the module for Host based replication. But only SRM can use it. So without SRM there is no vSphere Host based replikation.

What youre looking for is the total protection for no or less costs. I have to say sorry but in VMware land is this not possible.

If your storage provide replication in realtime and a transparent failover you can combine it with vSphere FT. Easy to setup and to maintain.

Regards
Joerg