fault tolerance between two hosts with DAS

[lastguru]

Hi,

I imagine that this is a pretty basic question, however I was unable to fine any sufficient answer to it in google. This might be because I have only a small experience in high availability and SAN systems...

So I am planning to buy two supermicro 1U servers with 4 SATA disks each, and install ESXi 4 on them both. Now I would like to have a HA configuration. If I understood correctly, VMware HA is only possible with iSCSI/NFS/FC storage. However I do not plan to include any network storage solution in this setup - just a poor man HA with local disks.

I imagine that I need to install ESXi on a flash drive together with a storage VM, that would do DRBD of all four disks with the neighbor server (for this I would put 4-port gigabit NIC in each and have one gigabit link per disk) and put a software RAID5 on top of this. After that I would probably need to put a NFS or iSCSI server (like openfiler) in that VM to provide other VMs a storage device to work with.

Does this make any sense at all, or am I overcomplicating this whole deal? What would be the performance of this system compared to going without any HA, just with local disks? I do want to have a good performance on this though... comparable to a RAID5 of the same drives accessed normally as a DAS.

Thanks in advance

[Texiwill]

Hello,

HA will not work without Remote Storage, that being said you can use local storage if you have a replicating iSCSI/NFS server. I.e. replicates between two local RAID VMFS.... Xtravirt Virtual SAN (Now with PhD Virtual) and Lefthand VSA both do this. I do not think OpenFiler has this functionality built in.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009

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[TobiasKracht]

Hello, lastguru.

step by step:

1. install ESXi on flash drive.2. Create datastore on flash drive.3. Install hyper-v server (as free OS).4. Install StarWind HA5. Setup DAS storage as HA iSCSI storage

6. Setup HA storage as new datastore.7. You can migrate VM with hyper-V to datastore in case of what. You can use not Hyper-V if there is no machine for remote management.

Regards.

StarWind Software R&D

http://www.starwindsoftware.com