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DaveVsTheWorld
Contributor
Contributor

Synch VMs between 2 ESXi servers?

I was wondering if ESXi is capable of synching VMs to another hardware server.  For instance, I have 5 virtual machines on one server, how can I get them onto another ESXi server automatically without having to manually copy all 5 vmdk files every day.  Does VMware have something to do this for me?  I'm not too familiar with what all products VMware has.

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

vmware does not provide such features at least for now. what you would need would be host level replication that does virtual to virtual replication. For example veeam and quest's vranger. If you're on a SAN storage, you can buy two similiar SAN storage and have it replicated using the built in replication features.

Lee_Sargeant
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This may be a step further than you require but if these for critical applications there is the option of VMware Fault Tolerance.  It has some quite strong limitations (such as single vCPU) but is the only automatic way of having the guest up to date on two boxes at the same time.

DaveVsTheWorld
Contributor
Contributor

Yeah, something exactly like that is what I'm after.  For right now it doesn't have to be a live copy, but maybe someday it will.  For now I'm just looking at it to be a nightly copy.  I'm just not familiar enough with all this VM stuff, so I'm interested to know what's even possible to do with it.  I'll read up on that Fault Tolerance.

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DaveVsTheWorld
Contributor
Contributor

oh i see, it's included in the advanced version, and that runs about $3,000.   Pretty steep for small/medium sized office.

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Lee_Sargeant
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Ah I see.  Are your ESXi hosts running in a cluster or standalone?  If they have shared storage you could have a perl/powercli job that does this for you or perhaps even have them FTP across if they don't have shared storage.

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DaveVsTheWorld
Contributor
Contributor

I just have 2 standalone servers with Windows VMs and I copy nightly the data (automated) from one to the other for backup purposes.  It's just that I can't copy the OS over without having to manually copy and paste the vmdk file.  I'm looking for a way to automate that, or having a live synched server would be even better, but that aint free.

All the data is on local RAID1 and RAID0 arrays, I'm not moving to a NAS or a SAN, I need the database speed that local RAID controller can offer.

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