Esxi 5 and shared storage - Noob question, sorry!

[sargey]

Apologies in advance for my noobish (and probably very simple) question....

You have 2 phisical hosts, with shared storage for HA.

The shared storage goes down. What happens to the vms?

Are copies of the vms stored on each of the phiscal boxes as well as the shared storage?

Thanks in advance for the answer!

[Linjo]

No, there is no such functionality in ESX.

Usually you would solve this with highly available storage systems that includes replication of some kind.

// Linjo

[sargey]

So, in other words, you are best to take your chances and spread the vms over the two phiscal boxes and not use HA (unless you have replicated shared storage)?

If one phisical box goes down, you'll only loose a couple of vms, where as if you are using shared storage (without replication) and it goes down, you loose the lot? (I'm talking the building goes down, not just a hard disc faliure )

[Linjo]

Its all about cost vs risk, how much does it cost you for the servers to be down x number of hours/days until they are restored somehow.

VMware have really cool solutions like Site Recovery Manager that can automate the failover to another datacenter including replication of storage.

// Linjo

[sargey]

Thanks for your help.

I have realised that using fault tolerance on the vms will do what I hoped!

[jrmunday]

Make sure you understand all the requirements for FT before using it;

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/GUID-83FE5A45-8260-436B-A603-B8...