Fault Tolerance on different storage

[vJon]

Current setup:

• network is spread across multiple buildings
  
• all networking equipement (host servers, SANs) is located in one building
  
• workstions are located in other buildings
  

What I want to do:

• I want to provide zero downtime to my network if the building housing all the current network equipment is unavailable
  

Resources available:

• extra host servers
  

I like FT and it sounds like what I need to implement, but it sounds like it does not provide failover if the SAN is unavailable.  I have some unutilized host servers that I can setup in another building to provide a hot-site.  Ideally, I would like to have FT of my top tier VMs (housed in the building with all my network equipment) and the secondary VMs to run on my unutilized host servers located at another site.

Is there a way to make this happen?

[mcowger]

You can do it, but with very specific storage.

Something like LeftHand or VPLEX could do this as a Metro cluster.

FT needs the shared storage.

[vJon]

Is there any other vmware product to sync a backup VM at another physical location?  Your recommendation is specific to HP and EMC SANs.  I might be approaching this the wrong way.  How does VMware recommend you to keep business continuity if your wire closet suffers from a disaster like a fire?

[mcowger]

They'd recommend using SRM, which makes use of SAN replication (like that provided by EMC, HP, NetApp, etc) to replicate the VMs, and in case of a disaster boot those VMs in the DR location.

As of vSphere 5, however, you'll be able to do this without SAN replication for a couple VMs only using vSphere 5's Host Based Replication.

Again, these solutions are more like HA than FT - the VM DOES experience a hard reboot duringe failure.