esxi 3.5 redundancy

[jjj0923]

I have started to migrate a few of our servers to esxi 3.5, but before I get really serious about this I need to know if there's a product available from vmware that will allow me to create a hot spare of my esxi 3.5 server.

thanks in advance.

Jeff

[Troy_Clavell]

an easy way to provide redundancy is to get more ESXi Hosts, manage them with vCenter, configure HA/DRS, and backup your guests. Ensure everything is on shared storage....etc

.... if nothing else, just backup your guests, your ESXi Host(s) can be rebuilt quite easily

have a look at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9852 , for some great information.

[AndreTheGiant]

The best solution is use VMware HA and a shared storage (and vCenter Server).

But you can try to implement a replica and HA solutions

For some hint you can start from this document:

Andre

[jjj0923]

Andre - thanks and you'll be pleased to know that a woman friend of mine was Andre's PR person for many years. She said he was always great to work with.

[jjj0923]

I've never done shared storage. We use mostly DL380's and DL360's around here. I will have to take a look into external stirage solutions for these boxes. I was not aware that multiple servers could access shared storage simultaneously.

[jjj0923]

I do not understand what you mean by "backup your guests"

what are guests?

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

It is one of the hidden benefits of virtualizing - this shared storage also allows to do vmotion the abiity to move a running virtual machine form one ESX host to another with no downtime or impact to end users - think about the impact that will have when you need to hardware repairs or updates to your esx servers-

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful

[jjj0923]

is there any way to do this on a budget?

some of the prices for this stuff are quite high and we are just a small company - very small - just 6 employees but we have a number of servers.

[jjj0923]

edited:

I see - the price would be $3,744.00 with HA for up to 3 servers with 2 processors each.

I think this would work for me.

[AndreTheGiant]

You can have several ways, for example you can buy a NFS server compatible with ESX/ESXi, or use a VSA (virtual storage appliance).

Or simple make a VM backup with a restore on the other ESXi.

Or use product the do VM replication, like Veeam Backup or Vizioncore vReplicator.

Andre

[jjj0923]

I like the idea of this approach.

none of the systems I'm running on these servers would hurt us if they were down for an hour or two and we brought the other server up.

My biggest concern is the timeliness of the data and the idea of shared storage would take care of that. Then my secondary concern is having a standy server that would have the vm's duplicated

I have a combo of windows 2000 & 2003 servers and a few rh boxes and one of two Centos 5.3 servers.

can two seperate esx servers shared one datastore that's on a shared storage

I assume the shared storage is some sort of large scsi device with raid that can accomodate multiple connections from esx servers?

pardon my ignoreance I have not some shared storage before in this manner, though I have plenty of nix boxes with nfs shares and mounts.

[AndreTheGiant]

I assume the shared storage is some sort of large scsi device with raid that can accomodate multiple connections from esx servers?

You can have a "simple" external box with 2 controller and you are able to connect only to ESX/ESXi with SAS card (for example, Dell MD3000).

Or you can have a iSCSI storage with a dedicated GigaEthernet network and a lot of ESX/ESXi (for example, Dell Equallogic).

Or have a FC storage with a dedicated fibre network and a lot of ESX/ESXi (for example, EMC AX).

All this solution can do RAID and create "virtual disk" called (usually) LUNs.

Another way to have a shared storage is work with a NAS, but for ESX/ESXi you must have a NFSv3 over TCP.

Andre

[jjj0923]

what's the most cost effective?

here are my plans - noe of the servers I'm migrating require a lot of computer HP.

I figure about 750GB os storage is much more than enough. I am migrating 5 veru old compaq proliants with dual 550 MHZ processors and about 1 GM ram each onto the esx server.

for esx servers I was planning on buying Hp Proliant DL360's with 8 GB ram each, dual 3.4 HGZ processors and two drives in each (scsi 1) for the OS on each and then some sort of external shared device as my datatore what would be shared between both. The second DL360 would be for backup purposes or I could balance the load between the two servers and running 2 vms on one and 3 vms on the other. My primary concern would be how quickly I could restore a backup copy of one of the VM's over onto the other server if one failed.

is here an easy way to backup a vm-profile without all of it's data (since the data is already on a shared device) and then restore the vm-profile on the other server?

please pardon my naivete'

thanks

[DSTAVERT]

what's the most cost effective?

I assume here this is in reference to shared storage.

Shared storage can be as simple as a server with enough disks to cover your storage needs and a software package to convert it into shared storage. More smaller disks are better than two large ones. Software packages range from free (Less than 2 TB Starwind, Open-e, OpenFiler, FreeNAS) to several thousand dollars.

You can find iSCSI / NFS storage devices from IOmega, Thecus, Netgear on the lower end (1 to 3 thousand) to Dell, HP, IBM in the medium range $10,000 up.

is here an easy way to backup a vm-profile without all of it's data (since the data is already on a shared device) and then restore the vm-profile on the other server?

With the the Essentials Plus package and HA you would not need to do any copying of vm-profiles. A failure of one ESXi server would trigger vCenter (part of the Essentials package) to initiate an automatic startup of the Virtual machines on the remaining ESXi server.

[jjj0923]

ok folks - thanks to everyone that has helped me out.

I have a good handle on NAS now and have picked out a 2TB iscsi (and vmware certified) unit.

I have my servers orders that will be running esxi and I have a few remaining questions.

Due to budgetary constraints I'll have to go with plain old: VMware vSphere 4 Essentials(not plus) and wanted to know the best way to setup up my guests so that in the event of a failue of one of the esxi servers I can quickly bring up the other esxi server. I may wind up just spreading the load between the two.

Therfore how do I keep a guest up to date on the backup server in case I need to start the guest?

thanks in advance.

[AndreTheGiant]

A good backup solution could be a first level for a DR solution.

See also:

Andre