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Virtual san applicance software and clustering

I have been reading about Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) and their ability to make directly attached storage look like SAN storage.  

Here's what I would like to do with this technology :

have two servers running Windows 2008 R2

on the 'primary' server I want to have a single drive system partition running 2008 R2 and then several other directly attached drives that will serve to host HyperV VMs

on the 'secondary' server I want to have a single system partition running 2008 R2

I then want to run some type of VSA software (or any other idea that people can come up with) that will allow the directly attached drives on the primary be seen by the 'secondary' as if they were local drives as well i.e. if the OS on the primary sees 2 TB of space then the OS on the secondary will see 2 TB of space

I then want to cluster the VM's across the primary and secondary with Microsoft VM clustering

Ideally the software/technique used to turn the direct attached storage on the primary into shared 'SAN' storage will not slow access to the directly attached storage - in other words the software will be smart enough/efficient enough at the end of the day so that access to the directly attached storage on the primary server will be the same speed as if the software was not there - it would be smart enough not to put a layer of abstraction for actual directly attached disk versus non-directly attached disk.  In short I am willing to live with the fact that the secondary is slower than the primary.   The idea would be that if a VM did fail on the primary it would be ok if it came back to life  albeit slower on the secondary via VM clustering - we can live with performance degradation for a day or two.

Please note that I am familiar with VMWare and other alternatives to MS clustering/virtualization but for the purposes of this post I want to stick to the MS world of MS clustering and HyperV virtual machines and products/techniques that work with them.

Thanks in advance.
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Thanks for the product tips but I have read up on them and they haven't really (or I haven't understood) if they do what I want.  

I want whatever product used to allow me 2008 R2 VM failover cluster  Windows 2008 R2 server - Server A - with directly attached drives to another Windows 2008 R2 server - Server B - which is not directly attached to the storage. I don't want to buy any special enclosures, switches, etc.  to connect the two servers.  My question is can 2008 R2 failover clustering work when one server sees the drives as directly attached while the other sees it as 'virtual ISCSI' or whatever any of these products use?  I understand how R2 clustering works with a shared SAN via ISCSI or you can create a SAS-based SAN with products such as HP4000 but is it possible to have clustering between drives seen by different protocols? Hope that explains better.
Are you after an imagical product that lets you access the data on "server A" from "server B" when "server A" is turned off?

I must be reading this wrong. You want some software that replicates Server A to Server B most of the time so that when server A gets sick Server B takes over because it's got a full copy of all of the disks? That's not so hard, any of the VSA products do that.
Try Veeam Backup and Replication v6, if you want to replicate VMs between ESX hosts, with no shared storage.
I don't want to replicate. I want somebody who has experience with Virtual Storage Appliances (or similar technology)  to tell me whether they have been able to use  Windows 2008 R2 clustering with a Virtual Storage Appliance. As I understand it Virtual Storage Appliances allow Directly Attached Storage in one or more servers to show up to the same/or more/other  servers on the network as one big pool of disk space - hence the name Virtual Storage/SAN.  In order to do MS clustering between two servers the two servers must see one pool of shared drive space - usually an ISCSI target or something like a SAS-SAN like the HP P2000 series. I can do MS clustering on both of these types of architectures.  With a Virtual Storage appliance the disk storage is directly attached to one server but in some way the Virtual Storage software allows other servers to see the storage just as if it was an ISCSI target or 'virtually' directly attached storage. But is that good enough for MS Clustering?  I think this question will only make sense to somebody who has actually set up a Virtual Storage Appliance and tried to cluster it with MS Clustering.
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I really appreciate the additional detail and staying on this.  

hancocka:
You wrote:
"Yes, ALL the VSA support Failover Clustering.
The VSA software turns local disks into an iSCSI SAN."

Failover clustering as in Windows 2008 R2 clustering? Just want to confirm. Have you tried it yourself as well?

++++++++++++++
andyalder:

Thanks for the detailed pricing/specs.

One item. You wrote:
" you want a cluster but you don't want it to be highly available"

Yes, that's a good way to put it.  Here is what I am thinking. I have one server directly attached to the storage in question - let's say it's SSD.  And I have several VM's on this storage - most of them being Terminal Server VM's. The other computer sees the same SSD drives via some of the software we've - so slower access, maybe 1 gig Ethernet speed. The two servers are in a 2008 R2 cluster. One of the TS VM's goes down on the main box holding the SSD drives. The failover clustering then activates the 'twin' VM on the other half of the cluster. There's a blip and then the VM is back on line - albeit a bit slower as it's now going through the 1 gig connection as opposed to being directly attached to the SSD.  Ok, I then live migrate the VM back to the server with the SSD's in it - another short blip.  So total of two blips for the users and a short period where their connection was at 1 gigabit - but again these are Terminal Servers that are not maxed out (assume that I have a nice collection of TS servers in a farm so none are overly taxed). Will the VSA - Lefthand - or any other that you know of -  allow for this type of integration with Server 2008 R2 fail over clustering? Is that what you tried/have tried?
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Fellows,

Thanks for the additional notes but I'm still not clear so sorry to be a pest - are either of you using Server 2008 R2 clustering in conjunction with any of the products you mention?  It is the key consideration for me so I would like to know there is somebody out there who has tried it with VSA product/any VSA product.
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Awesome. This whole post was super.  Thanks for all the extra attention.
All around excellent info.