Can I have failover and data mirroring/backup capabilities with 2 ESXi 6.5 hosts and each having local storage only?

[wudevr99]

I'm looking at deploying 2 ESXi 6.5 servers (ProLiant DL380 Gen9) with locally attached storage.

My questions are:

- Can I configure the 2 hosts, so that If 1 node goes down the other node will run all the vm's until the other node is brought back online?

- Can I have the 2 nodes backup or mirror each other's local storage, so I don't need to introduce a separate backup solution?

[erikverbruggen · Accepted solution]

Without shared storage between the hosts it is only possible to provide an a-synchronous storage replication between the local datastores with for example vSphere Replication.

This will provide you with a copy of the VM data on the other local datastore. If for some reason the host running the VM fails, you will have to manually start the VM on the remaining host.

Because vSphere Replication is a-synchronous the data of the VM will not be real-time depending in the configured RPO time. For more information about vSphere Replication, VMware vSphere Replication 6.5 Documentation Center

[wudevr99]

Thanks for the reply Erik.