can I use 2 r710 poweredges for HA or do I have to buy a san to achienve this?

[renotechnology]

I'm running esxi 4.0 update 2 and I want to take this environment to the next step and add HA but I'm not clear on the requirement of shared storage. I'd like to jsut use the datastores on each r710 and mirror it on the other 710 so when it comes time for the main server to come down the other server will kick in. I've hear you can do it both ways?

[golddiggie]

In order for HA to work, you must have the VM's on a SAN/NAS (not local to the hosts)... Otherwise, if you lose host A with x VM's on it, they cannot be picked up by host B since the hardware/storage where they reside is also down...

VMware VCP4

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[AndreTheGiant]

As written, to use HA (and/or vMotion, DRS, FT, ...) you must have a shared storage.

There are some VSA (storage appliance) than can also make replication, but could be not so simple.

A simple solution is buy Veeam Backup & Replication or Vizioncore vReplicator and schedule a VM replication between the two hosts.

Note that this is not an automatic HA solution and replication is not a synchronous replication.

Andre