Vmotion setup help!

[frenchj991]

Hello,

Just a quick question for the experts regarding setting up vmotion:

1.  Does vmotion require a cluster?  We currently have 6 host but they are not setup in a cluster.  Can we still enable vmotion?

2.  If I want to setup a cluster and add our invidual hosts to the cluster, when added the hosts resources join the cluster.  What happens if those hosts are accessing a shared iscsi storage.  Does this cause the shared storage to become unavilable to the other clients that are not in the cluster?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Jeff

[idle-jam]

1) you will need cluster if you want to have DRS and HA. other than that it's fine

2) nope, they will coexist with different local storage of diff host as well as the shared storage. just that when one host could not see the shared storage of that particular VM to be VMotioned, the vmotion check will fail.

[frenchj991]

in regards to #2, should the 2 host still be able to see the shared storage?  so what would fail in the vmotion?

also though of another question:

3. Can vmotion be enabled and used on the same vmkernel used to connect to the scan with iscsi?  we do now have any additional network cards available to seperate it since we currently have setup redundant paths to the iscsi storage

thanks,

jeff

[idle-jam]

2) take for example:

server one has local datastore and iscsi datastore 1

server two has local datastore and iscsi datastore 1 and iscsi datastore 2

datastore 2 and each of own local datastore will still appear and nothing will be changed. if you have a VM that is in iscsi datastore 1 you could vmotion between two hosts with no problem. now if you have a vm on iscsi datastore 2 and you would like to move to server one, then in the wizard of the vmotion it would say fail as server one could not see iscsi datastore 2.

3) yes it can be done, not a good practice but then it will work

[frenchj991]

idle-jam, looking at the attached network diagram is there a better way you could suggest to implement vmotion with the network resouces we have, keeping in mind the redunancy we have setup?

thanks,

jeff

[idle-jam]

looking at it, the iscsi are created on the two nics are not optimized. have a look here http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/03/18/iscsi-multipathing-with-esxcliexploring-the-next-version-of-...

once you conbined both the vmnic2,3 in one vswitch then you can create the vmotion vmkernel

[frenchj991]

unfortunetly we have a ibm ds3300 and it is only compatible with the MRU pathing policy, that is why we setup the access to the SAN that way..most of the other documents and examples I have found are setup differently for round robin, which we cannot use.

thanks for all your help;

jeff