Vmware ESX 3.5 and two SAN storage arrays

[rimvydukas]

Hi,

I have very simple question. I want my virtual machines to use both SAN arrays I have for array redundancy reasons. Is ESX able to create some kind of redundant VMFS RAID1 volume or are my only options:

1. To present two virtual disks from each array to my VM and use VM OS software mirroring

2. To use some kind of arrays hardware mirroring feature which is rather expensive?

[mcowger]

VMFS doesn't do the RAID for you.

1) Sure, this is possible.....but a pain to maintain.

2) No automatic failover for this.

Why not buy an array/fabric you trust?

--Matt

[rimvydukas]

This is exactly as I tought:(

As for trusted array - we have 2xEVA8100:) I think these arrays are rather trusted and well known:) But I think that even most trusted array can fail some day and we want to have highly available environment. So it's kinda strange that ESX can't support lets say redundant VMFS RAID1 volume.

It would be very interesting thing to know others ESX users experience in working with two storage arrays. I think that this is not an option to use ESX with only one storage array even it is most trusted one.

[patrickds]

if you're using EVA8100, you should get the Continuous access licenses, which will do exactly what you want.

Surely the extra couple of $1000 doesn't compare to the cost of the systems themselves, and the importance of the data you can protect with it.

[rimvydukas]

Continuous access option have its shortcommings for our environment so we're not using this option. So I was hoping that ESX will be able to support mirrored VMFS volume:( It's strange that such an option is not supported by ESX yet. Let's take new Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Vmware Server:) Both have such an option. But ESX...:(

[patrickds]

hyperv and vmware server are windows host based, with vms on ntfs partitions, which will not be sharable between hosts (afaik), as is possible with the vmware vmfs filesystem.

Therefore a software mirroring solution can work on those, but will probably have to run on the host itself, causing system and especially i/o overhead.

ESX is all about providing the best possible performance to the guests, and introducing this kind of overhead would not make any sense.

If you really want to, there might be software mirroring solutions you could get to work on the service console, but they would not be supported