Need advice on increased redundancy/reduced down time

[shannonadams]

Currently, at small remote sites, I have two vSphere servers that run two VM's each. I am using Veeam Backup

& Replication to replicate the VM's back and forth nightly. Both servers

have local/internal disks. Both vSphere servers use the vSphere Essentals license.

The upside to this is it is less expensive than using shared storage and and a more expensive vSphere license. The down side is that if one of the servers died, I would have to bring up the VMs on the one working server, but it would be from the night before. At some sites, we cannot afford to lose up to a day's worth of data. So, I need to have HA working on the two servers; which will require shared storage.

I know HA will give me quick failover capabilities at the server level, but we need SAN redundancy as well. These remote sites won't be running VM's that require a lot of system resources, but the uptime, high availability, and no loss of data in the event of a SAN or server crash is critical.

1. Would vSphere 4 Essentials Plus work for this? Or do I need to go to the Standard license.

2. I have only used internal stored at the remote sites. For shared storage, I have heard that iOmega makes some good, inexpensive products that could work in this environment. Any thoughts on this?

3. With iOmega products, can you get two SANs that will keep each other in sync? If so, I assume this is outside of VMware.

Thanks for any guidance.

[AndreTheGiant]

Iomega has very interesting products, but replication is not present (as I remember) in entry level family.

You can consider some virtual storage appliance (VSA), in this case you can convert local storage as "shared storage" and, in most cases, you can do also replication.

Andre

[shannonadams]

Thanks for the info. Basically, what I am trying to avoid is having to

roll back up to a day if one of my VMware servers crashes at a remote

site. Each site has two servers for replication and both run 1 or 2

VM's each. What I need is real time replication so that in the event of

a crash, we might lose a just few minutes or transactions versus a

whole day (using today's method of nightly replication).

I don't necessary care to purchase two arrays because of the expense,

but I need to do whatever it takes to have close to real time HA and

fail over if a server dies. The following looks intriguing and if I am

reading the info correctly, I could use this in my existing environment

and only have to upgrade Essentials to Essentials Plus.

http://www.stormagic.com/

Thoughts?

[AndreTheGiant]

Also StorMagic could be interesting.

Or, if you can relay also with a bigger delay (in "replication"), you can use Veeam Backup & Replicator.

Andre