SAN Failover... with Stretched VLAN

[minimoon]

Hi, someone has put a proposition in front of me for review and I'm needing to confirm the concept... from my experience, I have my doubts.

The concept is to use h/w level SAN replication to replicate the Virtual Machines to a second SAN (in another Data Centre) and fire them up on Failover ESX Servers a the same VLAN (Stretched VLAN from Production Data Centre).

Sounds great in theory, but can ESX handle this... I'm sure there are some pitfalls here!!

[whynotq]

theory is sound, you'll need to re-register the VMs at the dr site but sounds fine. Have a site that does this with EMC and Mirrorview replication.

[boydd]

We're doing the same thing. Just make sure to have the necessary bandwidth needed for the broadcast domain.

DB

[elmonogrande]

I am currently trying to do this but once the VMFS's are presented via the second SCSI target, I have no idea how to add them back in. Suggestions?

[boydd]

You'll have to re-signature the LUNs/Partitions so the new ESX servers can take ownership.

DB

[minimoon]

Excellent news. VM's will be crash consistent... but I guess we will have to live with this.

Thanks for the sanity check... thought was being over ambitious with the technology.