HA with physical devices attached to a VM

[ScottBentley]

Quick question about HA

We are considering Essentials Plus to enable HA over a couple of host servers for a small environment.

One of the guests will host a backup solution and be attached to a physical tape device using SCSI passthrough.

I know if the server were to be restarted on the other host the physical device would obviously not be available, my question is would HA actually be able to relocate the machine to the second host in the event of a failure, or would it fail due to it having a physically attached device that is unavailable on the second host?

I know this causes VMotion to fail but right at this present time I don't have access to a test environment to check, done a bit of digging here and couldnt find anything definitive.

Many Thanks

Scott

[depping]

I would say HA just boots it without the device being available.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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[TobiasKracht]

HA will reboot VM on other host, but in iSCSI initiator you just will see name of device and status "reconnecting", that`s all. In this case al should be ok.

StarWind Software R&D

[depping]

he's talking about a physically attached scsi device which is being accessed by a VM via passthrough I guess.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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[ScottBentley]

Hi Guys

Thank you for the swift responses, the device is actually going to be a directly attached SCSI Tape drive usins SCSI passthrough. I will try and get a test lab set up here and try it just to be on the safe side.

Regards,

Scott

[ScottBentley]

Ok just done some testing.

Thought I would post my findings here so far

I am unable to start the server on another host, this host however does not have the same physical SCSI adaptor the original host has, maybe this would change the result?

Error is as follows when attempting to manually power on the server, guessing the same would happen with HA

Power On virtual machine

Backup 2003 R2 Server

Unable to open SCSI device '/vmfs/devi-ces/genscsi-/vml.020100-000050060b0-0005860ba556-c74726975' (scsi0:1): Could not find the file. Module DevicePower-On power on failed.

View details...

Unfortunatly I am unable to replicate this at the moment as I dont have access to a blade with the same hardware.