need help with a low-cost virtualized server setup

[goodcooper]

ok, after looking at a few SAN setups and realizing that they would just be adding complication and are overkill for my needs, i'm looking at putting two identical servers running xenserver side by side...

for examples sake, say i have 8 VMs on these two servers, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H....

server 1 normally hosts A, B, C, and D

and server 2 normally hosts E, F, G, and H

so what i would like to see happen is the virtual servers go down or get suspended and then syncronized, so that the virtual disk drives get copied, EFGH to server 1, and ABCD to server 2

can this be scripted to happen nightly with xenserver?

this way if server 2 ever explodes, i would only be a day behind, and i could start up EFG and H on server 1 and it could run double duty until i have server 2 fixed...

this way i don't have to buy a SAN, high speed network equipment to hook up to the san, yet i have a fairly quick failover in case something happens...

due to the nature of the business, being down for a few minutes is not a big deal, and also nothing really happens past 6pm and before 8am, so bringing the servers down in the evening is not a big deal either...

thoughts?

 

[Vader]

You may not need a "SAN" for you're doing. There are plenty of products out there that are reasonable in cost and are very easy, such as the IOMEGA PX4-300d or 600d offering both NFS ans iSCSI at very good price/performance and may suit your need just fine.

 

[NetJunkie]

Yep. Several good options on the vSphere HCL. Synology, Iomega, QNAP, NetGear...etc. Or buy the new VMware VSA and share out duplicated local storage with a supported product.

 

[Jagged]

We recently installed 2 ESXi 4.1 standalone servers. We decided rather than looking at SAN/NAS and vSphere licensing, that we would look to other technologies to provide the redundancy we were looking for. If you start thinking about redundancy then you soon realize you would need a redundant SAN/NAS solution, as well. It's just a matter of how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

Our basic plan was that each physical host would host "duplicate" vm's. We have 2 DCs, 2 File/Print servers, 2 Exchange 2010 Servers, and 2 TS servers.

We use DFS to replicate data between the 2 file servers and Exchange DAGs to replicate email data. We're also using HAProxy to provide some failover redundancy should one of the Exchange servers fail. While this has some added complexity, we've found it to work quite well.

If being "only a day behind" is ok, why not rely on server backups (to tape/disk).

 

[NetJunkie]

And there is nothing wrong with using application-based replication tech. You give up some things, but you also gain some things and usually lower cost. That's why I always talk about different options with people. It's not always (though...being EMC partner we like it to be) about SAN-based replication. If you want to do it without app support there are always things like Veeam Backup/Replication which is great as well as the new host-based replication in vSphere 5/SRM 5.