Understanding an HA installation

[Smitty1829]

I am new to the VMware HA configuration and just wanted to be sure I have my thoughts in order. We are looking to do a configuration as shown below:

For my test bed, I have 5 ESXi servers, there will be 2 in each cluster/resource pools and one spare that will run the vCenter vm among others. I am thinking I need to create a data center in vCenter. This would consist of two virtual clusters (2 esxi servers each). A resource pool in each cluster that contains my virtual machines. The problem I am having is getting my head around the storage/datastores. For my HA environment do I need to have a NAS share mounted on each esxi server and store all my virtual machines there? Is this volume/datastore then used for "datastore heartbeating"? My vCenter layoutlooks like this but I think I am missing the big picture. To complicate things I am installing Oracle RAC with ASM and I have a JBOD attached to esxi server1 and 2 which is used for their storage.

I think I am over complicating this. Any specific documentation would be helpful.

Thanks for the help and/or suggestions

[depping]

it is fairly straight forward:

HA = High Availability ==> requires shared storage

If you have no shared storage than HA when a host fails cannot failover the virtual machines.

If you have 5.0 or upwards those datastores will be used for datastore heartbeating indeed. You need to have 2 datastores at a minimum.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc%2FGUID-63F459B7-88...

[Smitty1829]

Thanks.

I was thinking that was the case. This now leads to how is the shared storage setup between the esxi servers. Is this setup directly at the esxi installation(on the server). If that is the case is there a doc that explains it? I have been searching around for the answer and all I can find seems to skate around it. I have not found any documentation that clearly describes how the shared storage is setup and configured. I have a NAS here that I can use. Is there a way to get a "network: share mapped on each of the esxi servers to used for shared storage or does this need to be a physical connection, say fiber to a SAN?

Thanks for the link, I am reviewing it now.

Smitty

[depping]

I explained here how to connect an NFS share: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/13/back-to-basics-using-the-web-client-to-add-an-nfs-share/

There is also a massive amount of documentation to be found here: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html

[Smitty1829]

Thanks

I am looking it over now.