Architect my VMWare solution

[genevish]

My company has been using the free ESXi and we are ready to move to a paid version.  I'm a little confused on the options, and how to best structure the solution.  I'm hoping you can help.

We have a main datacenter here, and another office down the street with a smaller datacenter.  Most of our VMs are used for development purposes, but we have a few production servers well.

My thinking is that we could have two servers, one at each location, giving us the ability to move VMs between them as needed for load balancing, maintenance, etc.  My questions are:

• Is this a good approach?
• What products do I need to buy for this?  I spoke with a sales rep but was just as confused after the call.
• Would we be able to use vMotion to seamlessly transfer machines from one site to another, or would the latency be too high, since they are geographically separate sites?
• What sort of server hardware should I have?  Disk space that can handle all of the servers (in case I need to move all of the VMs to one machine)?  Does the storage need to be on a SAN or NAS?
• Any other considerations?

Thanks,

-Scott

[Nick_Andreev]

You won't be able to vMotion VMs between two sites, because ESXi hosts at site B won't be able to access storage of site A. If you're planning to use FC SAN and willing to stretch your FC network between two sites, then that's achievable. But you will need dark fibre between two sites to interconnect the FC fabrics.

Another option is to use replication between the sites.There are many products, such as Zerto, RecoverPoint or even array-based replication, but none of them are cheap. Maybe look at native vSphere Replication. Replication obviously won't let you vMotion VMs between the sites, but you'd be able to shutdown VMs at production site and bring up a copy at DR.

You will also need a stretched Layer 2 network between the sites to provide connectivity to your VMs on the same network subnet. Unless you won't to re-IP VMs every time you move them.