ESXi

I'm new to Vsphere and finally got it implemented in our environment.  I'm not able to convince management to get a SAN for shared storage.  I basically have two hosts and have 6 virtual servers, as of now I'm running them all on one host and periodically coping them over to the other host for a cold standby.  I'm looking for some suggestions on the best methods for creating HA and FT with this setup.  I currently don't have vCenter, which I'm assuming is almost a necessity.

Thanks,

Mike

Hi Mike welcome to the communities,

vCenter Server is a must for HA and FT.

You should check out the vSphere Essentials Plus kit, which contains a vCenter license to manage up to 3 hosts and the ESXi licenses for 3 hosts with up to 2 processors each. This is should be the cheapest possibility for small environments like yours.

Nevertheless you need a shared storage to use those features.

It doesn't always has to be a SAN though. a NAS might do it as well. ESXi supports NFS shares as Datastores for VMs.

Vendors like Synology for example offer small VMware certified NAS boxes.

You can find VMware certified systems here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=san

Regards

Tim

For out of the box HA and FT support, you really need some type of shared storage and an installation of Virtual Center Server. You could also try a third party tool (something like Veeam) to set up replication of your VM's, but best would be to get some kind of shared storage in for the out of the box support. If it is really just starting the VM's on the other host incase the primary one fails, you might be best off with a decent backup solution.

you nedd to install vcenter

and you need to add the VSA component to share the local datastore and will provide to you framework HA and FT via NFS technology

regards