Branch office problems

[richardlilley]

we have a branch office, two ESX 3.5 hosts, no SAN, using local storage, they are managed by our VC in the main office.

problem,

with the local storage, we are unable to use storage vmorion to get the server off the hostsa to patch the hosts.

is there a away that the local storage on the ESX hosts can be shared out as an iSCSI target for the other server to see?

i know this is prob a massive NO, but it would save me getting a san for the remote site.

ideas?

R

[IB_IT]

check out this thread...

[dominic7]

You can install a storage appliance ( lefthand, starwind etc ) which is a VM that will use the space on your VMFS volume, and present it as an iscs/nfs target which you can then see on your other ESX host. You could then use storage VMotion to move the VMs to the storage appliance space, patch, and then storage VMotion back. There is nothing natively in ESX that would allow you to do this though.

Realistically though, I'd just buy some other storage that can be shared between the hosts.

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

Storage VMotion require that the ESX that own the VM can see both source and destination storage.

So to do a live storage migration you really need a shared storage (for example, there are some cheap NFS device that can be useful).

With the VM powered-off you can instead do a cold storage migration also on other storage on other ESX.

Andre