VMFS Mirroring

[steve10]

I have two SAN's. The first holds my vmfs volumes which host 20 virtual servers, the second SAN is unused. The two SAN can be connected using FC or over the network.

Does anyone know of away I could mirror the vmfs volume on SAN 1 across onto SAN 2.

Many thanks

Steve

[chris-m]

We experienced this with EMC SAN (DMX1000 and 2000) the replication was done with SRDF solution.

Then all the VMs on the SAN were copied on the second site (DRP).

But, only one copy of each LUN was accessible in read/write mode (the second one is read only).

It was a storage solution, not a VMWare one.

What's your problem, what are you expecting?

Message was edited by:

chris-m

[Eddy]

As Chris said, you usually need a third party virtual storage product to perform this task. We use IPSTOR from Falconstor to perform the very same.. We go from Shared SCSI arrays to SANs.. We present the storage from one box to the other (ipstor) and we mirror it all off. Very little down time for users, basically at the very end in order to remove the virtual layer from SAN1, but its a server reboot if all is planned out properly.

[bister]

At the moment there is no solution for a SAN-mirror using host-based-mirroring (that's a feature VMware wants to implement into ESX some day maybe). The are some tools providing some mirroring mechanisms, but I didn't try them: ESXranger and DoubleTake. As said, didn't try them nor quite sure about names.

[chris-m]

Hummm ESXRanger was (for me) a backup tool, nothing else.

This mirroring feature is a new one? Which version is it?

[bister]

As mentioned I didn't try it, I was just told so. Could also be another product by that company.

[mcwill]

ESXReplicator is probably the product you were thinking of, by the same company. It automates snapshotting and transmitting the VM copy to a backup ESX host.

[ivanfetch]

Hello,

I have two SAN's. The first holds my vmfs volumes

which host 20 virtual servers, the second SAN is

unused. The two SAN can be connected using FC or over

the network.

We have something simelar, two Hitachi NSC55 units connected on a dual fabric FC network, each NSC55 is in a separate data center (we have fiber between the two buildings).>

Does anyone know of away I could mirror the vmfs

volume on SAN 1 across onto SAN 2.

We're using SANRAD <a href="http://www.sanrad.com/Products/VSwitch3400/">V-Switch 3400"</a> ISCSI gateways to accomplish this.

The 3400 is connected to our FC switches, and sees a LUN from each of our NSC55s. The 3400 mirrors the two LUNs and presents a single LUN to the VI3 hosts over ISCSI. Currently I"m doing this with about 7 pairs of LUNs, around 30 virtual machines.

We've needed to shutdown a data center (including it's FC storage) and VMWare never knew or caired; when the data center was braught back online, we just told the 3400 to re-sync the mirror.

We actually have two 3400s which run in a cluster configuration - so the 3400s are redundent too.

I'm happy to talk if you'd like more info or have specific questions.

[ivanfetch]

Hi Eddy,

We're using <a href="http://www.sanrad.com/Products/VSwitch3400/">SANRAD V-Switch 3400 gateways</a> to accomplish the same thing.

How have you found the IPSTOR to perform? We were initially looking at them, but SANRAD was much more responsive to our questions about VMWare integration. I've always been curious how the IPSTOR is put together though - look and feel, admin interface, how well it's supported.

Thanks,

Ivan.

[Eddy]

I dont have any complaints about IPSTOR, support is excellent. I have worked extensively with their support team and they are a class act.

We have had some nags as with any piece of software, but nothing thats a show stopper. We were trying to do too much with the limited storage we originally had, but in a SAN environment, all is good.

The only comment I have is with its Failover pair, failover could use some tweaking..