0

I am new to XenServer 6.2. I have 2 Dell machine, each with 24GB RAM, 3x600GB HDD. It is possible to run VM in XenServer on 1 machine and then replicate to another Dell machine as HA.

I went through a lot of documentation as HA require a NFS or iSCSI. How can I utilize the internal HDD space at same time deploy XenServer + HA?

conandor
  • 229
  • 3
  • 7
  • 18
  • I've seen XenServer use DRDB to achieve shared-nothing DR. But DR was all it was - no live migrations or anything. – Mark Henderson Feb 18 '14 at 03:42
  • You might look into what (if any) virtual storage appliances might be available for XenServer. There's a plethora of them available for vSphere and Hyper-V but maybe not for XenServer. A VSA should give you the capability of creating "virtual" shared storage from the local storage between your two hosts and should have some type of HA capability as well. – joeqwerty Feb 18 '14 at 04:21

1 Answers1

1

Answer: No, sorry you need some kind of shared storage device that is accessible by all your pool xen servers.

The easiest way to achieve this is purchase a plain linux box running a serverised version of linux. CentOS 7 and Debian both should work well here.

Hardware should be high quality, because its a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) for your pool. I'd recommend "more smaller disks" rather than "fewer large disks" to increase the throughput.

Then set up an iscsi server and share the disks.

You'll need dedicated gigabit ethernet as a minimum. A channel bond of several gigabit ports would be better, and in a perfect world you'd have a pair of stacked switches to take this traffic redundantly.

The iSCSI network should be isolated from your front-end networks too - a separate VLAN would be the minimum, but dedicated ethernet for iscsi is a good idea.

Criggie
  • 2,219
  • 13
  • 25