High Availability without Shared Storage

[sgunelius]

I'm guessing the answer to my question might be VSA or possibly vSAN, but what is the simplest way to implement high availability for VMs using DAS on the vSphere 5.5 hosts?  I have a need to support (3) VMs on (2) hosts, but don't see the logic in purchasing the P4000 storage array that was proposed.  Can I make the VMs highly available with shared storage?  The "enhanced" vMotion sounds great, but if the host supporting the VMs fails, I'm down.  Maybe vSphere Replication is the answer, but thought I would throw this out to the community.  I'm using ProLiant DL380p G8 and have plenty of DAS capacity available.

Cheers

Scott

[a_p_]

Depending on the VMs roles, vSphere Replication may indeed be an option if you can afford the loss of not yet replicated data in case of a host failure. On the other hand, if an HP host with a Smart Array controller crashes in a way that it cannot be repaired, you can simply pull the disks and plug them into another server.

André

[wrxguy]

Your DAS may be turned into Shared NFS Storage.

[Gortee]

Really depends on your requirements.  You could use the VSA.  You could also use an additional server with local storage in a raid to present to ESXi via NFS.  It works great.   Don't expect P4000 performance from the solution but it would work just fine.   VMware solutions are limited to VSA and in the future VSAN but both have a cost associated.  I have seen some really neat setups with some SSD for cache used as well. 

Depends on budget and requirements. 

[sgunelius]

Gortee,

Sorry for the delayed response, but this project got shelved for a few weeks.  We're back on it and the project team lists a requirement for ~1TB of storage, although the VMs they specify only a total of 460GB.  They were finally able to clarify that they can withstand downtime of about 30 minutes for this application, so I don't need instantaneous failover & recovery.  I'm still thinking VSA is the way to go and might try to mitigate the performance issues using SSD instead of SAS on the two ESXi hosts.  I've got budget for the host hardware, but we can't justify purchasing an array or NAS to support this environment, I don't think I have another option.  Thanks.

Scott

[raldridge254]

Hi Scott

Do you have VSA included in your license?  If believe its now EOL and vSAN is the replacement, When I first looked at vSAN I found it quite an expensive solution for licensing and server grade SSD's

I think the P4000 you were suggested is over kill for what's needed, but have you checked out the Synology NAS'?  They will probably come in cheaper than vSAN and the SSD's and will give you what you want out of the box.

Rich