Trying to accomplish this scenario

[ccslai]

We have only been using the free version of Vmware server for the past year. We are now looking into purchasing ESX 3.5.

We are trying to accomplish this for a new project:

2 physical hosts that will consist of a MS SQL VM, MS Windows DC VM, MS MOSS WEB VM, MS MOSS APP VM, and MS CRM VM. The VMs on both physical hosts will be the same, ie, they will be in sync when data are read and written. When one of the hosts go down, the other host will take over. All the VMs will sit behind a Cisco ASA FW.

Is that possible?

[weinstein5]

What are you going to use to synchronize the VMs? Something like Double Take or MS Clusetring Services? Are you trying to obtain 100% uptime? If you can sustain a slight outage you can utilize VMware HA which will allow the vms to restart on the other host if there is a host failure -

[khughes]

I second weinstein on the VMware HA part. If you can take a small hit in downtime (essentially a reboot of affected servers) it would be a good way to go.

• Kyle

[ccslai]

For VMware HA, assuming it's physical host #1 that goes down, the VMs that get started up on physical host #2, will these VMs on #2 contain the latest data/etc...exactly the same as the VMs on #1 prior to #1 going down?

What if we wanna do network load balancing?

[weinstein5]

yes - the VMs will latest data prior to the crash - so for example if the o/s had an impending write to the disk when the crash occured - the vm will come up but the write will have been lost -

[James_R1]

I agree with the others that VMware HA would be the way to go, but that requires some form of shared storage (eg. SAN), which you don't mention in your original post...?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

VMware HA is invaluable but I also think vMotion would be useful as well. Some form of remote storage is required to use both of these: SAN, NAS (NFS over TCP), iSCSI (XVS, Server Device, Lefthand Networks VSA).

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization