Branch Office installation

[NHATech]

We have a 8 host/FibreChannel SAN, etc installation at our central office that we are very pleased with.

Now we are looking at many of our 20+ remote locations with an eye to replacing older servers with a VM environment.

What we are concerned with is placing to much on a single host. many of the remote locations have only 4-5 physical servers now. It would be easy to move them all into a single physical host. But there is a great deal of concern about the possibility that the single host would have a problem, bringing down the whole environment.

What is the most cost effective way to build a 2 host cluster that supports VMotion, HA, etc. Only considering hardware costs?

Are there low end (but supported) FC SANs? or is ISCSI ready for hosting the shared storage? I heard that ESX was going to have a way to have a replica on seperate storage (ie: each host would have large local storage, and esx would heep a mirror on each host).

[dkfbp]

Hi,

Look at lefthand. They have a virtual appliance you can install on the esx host and present all of the local storage as iscsi to the esx host. It can even replicate

to another esx host to keep the data in sync. This would be a cheap way to get vmotion.

Best regards

Frank Brix Pedersen

[Ken_Cline]

Moved to a more appropriate forum.

For a two-node cluster, the LeftHand Networks Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) for VMware mentioned above is a good option. It allows you to have redundancy of both servers and storage - all with only two boxes.

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

TVAR Solutions, A Wells Landers Group Company

VMware Communities User Moderator

[mreferre]

You might want to have a look at this:

Massimo.

[malaysiavm]

You can go for ISCSI storage solution. At the same time, Intel do have some new concept call modular servers and storage.

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[Ken_Cline]

Massimo - nice article...I'll have to remember that one for the next time this question comes up!

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

TVAR Solutions, A Wells Landers Group Company

VMware Communities User Moderator

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Another option is to look at an HP C-CLass Blade enclosure. You could start with 2 blades + 1 storage blade and that would meet your needs. The nice thing about this enclosure is that it runs on standard 110 voltage found in many remote offices. But two other systems with sufficient local storage may be just fine.

Office in a Box is a good idea, just use enough local storage and the VMs will run just fine. If you really need redundancy then 2 small boxes and an NFS/iSCSI server would also work.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization