2 locations, 2 ESX 3.5 servers, 2 SAN's. How do I replicate?

[Legendary]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to ESX. We are planning to set up the following situation:

• 2 locations connected to each other with 10Gb fibre. Distance is 93,2 metres.

• On every location there will be a HP DL580 server with ESX 3.5 Enterprise edition installed on it.

• On every location there will be a HP MSA2000 SAN (FC model).

I would like to achieve the following::

• On each location there will be active VM's.

• I want to replicate the SAN's so that in case one of the locations is unavailable the host on the second location will take over the active VM's on the first location.

I've got the following questions:

• Can I use Storage Vmotion to replicate the SAN's or do I need third-party software? If so, which software?

• Taking into account that every location only uses 1 host machine, do I need SAN switches?

• As soon as the failover takes place, do the VM's start up automatically on the other location or do I need to permorm manual actions to accomplish this?

I hope you can help me with this case.

Best regards,,

Aico

P.S. I just read the following article:

I think this is exactly what I need. (Also for my third DR site that I didn't mention yet. :smileyblush:) Do any of you know anything about this product and when the release date is planned? This is just to get some extra information. The most important thing is answers to my story above.

[aguacero]

Double Take and VizionCore are big players in this area.

http://www.doubletake.com/applications/virtual-systems.aspx

http://www.vizioncore.com/vReplicator.html

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

[DougBaer]

First off, Storage VMotion does not do replication -- it is basically for moving a VMDK between datastores -- more of a one-shot utility than a constant thing.

I believe that the current incarnation of SRM will require that you have replication at the storage array level and that array's vendor (HP, in this case) will need to provide the shim to allow SRM to interact with the arrays' replication. I am not aware of anything available at the MSA level, but the 2000 is pretty new and I suppose there could be something like Continuous Access/EVA that is available. The next big question is whether there will be an interface provided to SRM to control that replication.

My question is whether the 10GB fibre is FC or ethernet. In order to get the arrays to communicate, you will need FC connectivity between the sites (this could be FCIP or straight FC -- but I am not aware of anything faster than 4Gb FC available at this point). Assuming that this is a 10Gb ethernet pipe, you will need to configure FCIP on a SAN switch/gateway device in order to utilize this link for array replication.

I would assume that Vizioncore (the vReplicator guys) are working on an interface to allow SRM to use vReplicator for its replication requirements, but I don't know for sure.

HTH,

Doug

UPDATE: I just looked into this and it appears that the MSA2000 relies on Host-based replication technologies for out-of-the-array replication

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/storage/disk_storage/msa_diskarrays/san_arrays/msa2000fc/software.html

The "StorageWorks Storage Mirroring" software is a licensed version of the DoubleTake product. It does provide support for VMware ESX, but I don't believe it will integrate with first release of SRM.

Message was edited by: DougBaer

[RikMagon]

Hi Doug,

I was wondering if you used HP Storage Works Mirroring software - I have a very similar configuation but am having some issues with my ESX hosts viewing the VMFS volumes on the mirrored SAN. Let me know if you guys had any issues such as these.

Thanks,

Rik