HA with a HP MSA SAN VMFS Storage and an Overland NAS NFS Storage

[queensbridgeitt]

Hi

I am looking at introducing the HA features on my ESX4 cluster.

We have 3 hosts in a cluster and we have 2 data storage devices. One is a SAN which holds our business critical VM's and we have a NAS storage device which stores our low priority VM's.

I have just been watching the Train signal videos for vSphere4 and the topic on HA and the presenter said that for HA to work you obviously need to use shared storage but the question I had is if I have a host which goes down and I have VM's which are both on the SAN and NAS (which are both classed as shared storage), am I right in saying that regardless of whether its on a NAS or SAN the VM will be brought backup on a alternative host.

I see this being no issue with the SAN but wasn't sure if the same applied to the NAS. Just to mention I keep no VM's stored on the local disks of the hosts.

I think I know the answer to this and all VM's will start up on alternative hosts but thought i would double check.

Thanks

[mittim12]

They should all be brought back online after the failure. If you want the more critical VM's to have priority you can edit the VM restart policies. This can be found under the cluster settings, vmware HA and virtual machine options.

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[AndreTheGiant]

As written you can use priority to define which group of VMs must be restart first.

And also which VMs must not be restart.

But remember that HA must also consider:

• networking: heartbeat goes through network... so it must reliable and well configured

• admission control: if you plan to use, you must understand how it works

• isolation response: I sugget to disable it if your networking is not design for high HA

See also:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/

Andre