dual room / dual san configuration

[callius]

Any suggestions the idea is to have 2 rooms in the same large building approx 100 metres or so apart.

With a vmware server either side, and a san either side.

Really looking for help on replicated the vmdata so i can HA DRS etc between the rooms. Or is there a 3rd party vendor which allows you to do this.

Also should i have dual Virtual centre servers ?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

In order to use HA/DRS between the rooms you would need to have both SANs on the same fabric. If you have that then you could use HA/DRS/vMotion across dedicated wires or routed through to the rooms. I would opt for the dedicated wiring/switch ports/etc as 100m is not very far.

But this only works if both SANs are on the same fabric or the remote systems have access to the same SAN with the VMFS.

Best regards,

Edward

[portuguesedanny]

Hi All,

Interesting, & similar scenario for me!

I'm at the ''should I go iSCSI or FC..!'' stage. Also with a choice of either HP EVA4000 series or an EqualLogic PS3600x SAN devices, I'm trying to figure out what would be the best combination...

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=102080&tstart=0

The environment where I work is a new build and where at the design stage (all though it's got to be fully functional by Jan 08) theres lots of sales people trying to sell their product that the overall picture sometimes gets a little blurred and a good old chat in a forum tends help

Also we're have a two server room environment, approx 100m appart. Our problem at the moment is, what is the best combination of:

-FC/iSCSI (respectively)

-HP-EVA4000/EqualLogic-PS3600x

to host a large VI3 project, that also aims to be HA/DRS Vmotion enabled, across both of the SAN's & all servers?

Hardware:

-HP C Class proliants

-SunMicrosystems v40z (16Gb Ram, 20000Ghz)

Any suggestions or tips welcome

TIA

Danny

[callius]

Im a FC only person, this has already been decided. IBM DS4800 SANS.

The problem i see is that if i use HA/DRS etc i want to fail over the VM's with HA/DRS to the OTHER SAN. So each room is a contained unit.

There are some issues with SAN to SAN mirroring, aka you need to manual break the mirroring to allow host access to the other side of the mirror.

I have looked at Steel eye/doubletake software but this only mirrors at the Virtual machine level and is not true HA/DRS but rather just a form of clustering solution.

I have yet to find a product that sits on the VI3 at console level or on the Virtual center server that mirrors the VMFS file system between SANS.

I guess having 2 VMFS storage pools one live either site then mirrored to the opposite site works but doesnt give me true HA/DRS.

What would be great would be to have the VI3 servers all see the same storage/virtual storage and if one side fails it continues to work.

Any ideas folks ?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

You can not use HA/DRS to do your desired type of failover.

The only thing you can do is make sure systems in both rooms have access to the other rooms SAN. It is the only way to do anything close to what you want in real time using VMware's HA/DRS products.

If you want to keep everything separate you need to mirror VMs or LUNs from SAN to SAN and write some scripts to auto power things on if the other site goes down.

Best regards,

Edward