how to create a PDL scenario for HA in home lab on openfiler in vCenter 6

[lvaibhavt]

Hi All,

The new vsphere 6 gives a new HA option for Storage failures. I am trying to replicate the scenario on my home lab with openfiler.

I was able to test APD however how do I test PDL .. please suggest

Thanks

Vaibhav

[lvaibhavt]

I am using vmware workstation to run my home lab ...

[birdylarry]

For PDL you can simply delete the LUN/share on your openfiler backing your datastore, meaning your host will still be able to reach your openfiler interface but not be able to access the LUN/share.

In contrast with PDL, APD is when your ESXi host suddenly loses connection to your Openfiler's interfaces (meaning it cannot reach your openfiler interfaces in any way) and it doesn't know if and when it will come back online, in this scenario your ESXi host will keep trying to reconnect to it as opposed to PDL where it will stop attempting to reconnect.

In brief:

-To test PDL you simply delete the LUN backing your datastore and keeping the connection to your openfiler intact

-To test APD, disconnect your openfiler from the network

Hope this helps.

[lvaibhavt]

Hey Larry,

Thank you for replying.

If I remove the LUN from the openfiler console then it will remove the LUN's from all the hosts. In Openfiler I donot see an option where in I can remove LUN from one specific host, if the LUN is unmapped then all the hosts loose the connectivity. This will not help me.

Thanks

[birdylarry]

There's an option in openfiler to present an iSCSI LUN or NFS share individually to specific IPs. If you presented it to a range of IP or an entire subnet just power down yours hosts, present the LUNs/share to individual host using their specific IPs, power them back on and once the datastores are mounted just "unpresent" it to a specific host. You might have to restart the NFS or iSCSI service before you'll see the PDL.

I haven't used Openfiler in a long time and I can't remember the exact steps but I'm pretty sure they are there.