webiis
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Vmware Mirror Recommendation
I have two physical servers. Server A and Server B. I use local attached storage on both. I want to mirror a virtual machine between both servers, so that if server A fails I can run it off of Server B. Does anyone know of any software that will allow you to mirror a VM between two physical servers? Both servers are on the same network, subnet with a GB connection. The local storage is fast with 15K SAS drives.
ASKER
OK, I was trying to simplify my question, but it looks like leaving parts out actually hurt myself. We do have these two servers controlled by V Center Foundation and have the ability to hot clone them etc. Is there a way to do this in VMware?
ASKER
Yes, we are using esxi 4.0 and 4.1
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Mirroring is the act of writing to 2 disks simultaneously.. you can set up disks in a mirror using raid 1. you can also set up software mirrors inside a guest OS using 2 physical disks from 2 separate storage units. But in order to do this your VM must have visibility to both storage disks via the ESX host.
there is software that will allow you to create virtual shared storage between two ESX hosts. The Left Hand virtual appliance now owned by HP is one way to do this but it is very pricy. I know there are others.
Also, you can download the free Open Filer iscsi software appliance, an iscsi software solution that you can install on a server, or in a VM, and then use that as a shared storage appliance. If you don't have an extra physical server to install the Open filer sofware, you can deploy it as a VM:
1) install the open filer appliance as a VM on one of your ESX servers, ESX host A
2) Assign as much disk space as you can to the appliance from what you have available on your local storage, this space you allocate to Open filer will now be a pool of share storage accessible by any server via its iscsi initiator, including ESX and or any VM
3) connect both of your ESX host's iscsi initiators \ adaptors to the open filer VM's iscsi storage
4) Now that both ESX servers have shared storage which points to the Open filer VM, the VM on host A, you now have shared storage and can use VMotion and HA for any VM who's virtual disks are located on this iscsi storage pool.
5) Now you can take the VM for which you want its data mirrored, add 2 virtual disks to it, one disk will reside on the local storage of the ESX host, the other disk will reside on the Open filer storage pool. Log into your guest OS and configure a software mirror combining both the virtual disks using disk management, and voila, you now have a software mirror where data will be written to both ESX server A's disk and ESX server Bs disk.
there is software that will allow you to create virtual shared storage between two ESX hosts. The Left Hand virtual appliance now owned by HP is one way to do this but it is very pricy. I know there are others.
Also, you can download the free Open Filer iscsi software appliance, an iscsi software solution that you can install on a server, or in a VM, and then use that as a shared storage appliance. If you don't have an extra physical server to install the Open filer sofware, you can deploy it as a VM:
1) install the open filer appliance as a VM on one of your ESX servers, ESX host A
2) Assign as much disk space as you can to the appliance from what you have available on your local storage, this space you allocate to Open filer will now be a pool of share storage accessible by any server via its iscsi initiator, including ESX and or any VM
3) connect both of your ESX host's iscsi initiators \ adaptors to the open filer VM's iscsi storage
4) Now that both ESX servers have shared storage which points to the Open filer VM, the VM on host A, you now have shared storage and can use VMotion and HA for any VM who's virtual disks are located on this iscsi storage pool.
5) Now you can take the VM for which you want its data mirrored, add 2 virtual disks to it, one disk will reside on the local storage of the ESX host, the other disk will reside on the Open filer storage pool. Log into your guest OS and configure a software mirror combining both the virtual disks using disk management, and voila, you now have a software mirror where data will be written to both ESX server A's disk and ESX server Bs disk.
Regards,
~coolsport00