vSphere Fault Tolerance with no shared storage

[virtualale]

Hi,

I need zero downtime for one of my VMs, so I think to use Fault Tolerance. But I don't know whether Fault Tolerance is the solution or not because I haven't got shared storage.

I mean, I have one fisical host running vpshere connected to a Dell Unity Storage System in Site A, and other fisical host running vsphere in a Site B connected to a HP 3PAR Storage Systems, the distance between both Sites (A & B) is 300 mts.

Can I use Fault Tolerance and create a VM in Site A and "the mirror VM" in the Site B over different Storage Systems?

Thank you

[Finikiez]

You don't need to have shared storage for FT in vsphere 6.0 and 6.5

Primary requirement is a low-latency netwok and L2 connectivity between hosts. I doubt that you have this between your sites.

As well you need Ent+ license in 6.5 to be able configure FT.

Best Practices for Fault Tolerance

[ConstantinGhioc]

Hi Virtualale,

You can't do Fault Tolerance without some shared storage:

Virtual machine files (except for the VMDK files) must be stored on shared storage. Acceptable shared storage solutions include Fibre Channel, (hardware and software) iSCSI, NFS, and NAS.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-65-availability-guide.pdf Page 48 (Virtual Machine Requirements for Fault Tolerance)

[Nick_Andreev]

Hi virtualale,

What application are you trying to protect? I would suggest to go back to business and ask what their RPO and RTO targets are. There are very few businesses that can't sustain a minimal downtime required for restarting a VM at secondary site. In such scenario, most of the replication solutions would do, especially continuous replication like Zerto and RecoverPoint, which provide minimal RPO.

if you really need zero downtime, this will require significant investment from the business. It usually requires dark fibre links between sites and storage arrays with synchronous replication.