vSphere Fault tolerant ? is it possible to have the primary and secondary virtual server on different physical storage ?

[chrisAMS]

my idea is to get 2 SAN and make the primary on the 1st SAN, and the secondary on the 2nd SAN. In this case if 1 SAN failed the FT still run.

Is it working ?

[AntonVZhbankov]

No. Fault Tolerance protects you from host fail which is much more likely than SAN fail.

SAN usually has 2 controllers, 2 paths per controller, redundant power etc... You can build SAN that has even redundant back end, but it must look like a standard SAN for ESX.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[malaysiavm]

I suspect you may able to do this with Netapp Metrocluster architecture. I think it should able to work.

Craig

vExpert 2009

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[NTurnbull]

Please correct me if I'm wrong but all FT does is replicate the vm's memory state to another host and maintains a heartbeat to check if the vm is up on the primary host. If it fails then it presents the vm as running on the secondary host.

Surely the NetApp metro cluster architecture is SRM type functionality? i.e. the files comprising the vm are replicated but the running memory state is on the ESX host not the NetApp.

Thanks,

Neil

[AntonVZhbankov]

Topicstarter wants something like FT, but for storage, not for hosts. That's NetApp Metrocluster.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[NTurnbull]

Sorry Anton, I took the topic question as having a vm with FT enabled with the primary and secondary instances looking at different storage but same memory state - would FT work? Not as a fault tolerant SAN solution, hence the SRM mention.

Thanks,

Neil