0

I need some guidance with a VMWare project I'm working on. I'll explain what I'm trying to achieve first, then I'll list what I have, and what I've done so far (of course if i went wrong anywhere along the line, I don't mind taking steps back for the sake of moving forward in a proper manner.) First time i'm doing something like this, and it seems I'm in over my head and I seek help.

The situation we are looking to achieve is as follows;

  • Site A - 2 Hosts (Host A, Host B) + 1 Synology RackStation (NAS1)
  • Site B - 1 Host (Host C)

Important Software:

  • Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5

  • VMWare ESXi 6.5

The Situation

All hosts have VMWare ESXi 6.5

Host A is intended to be the primary host, with Host B being a secondary host that will remain powered off unless Host A fails for any reason, then Host B will be powered on, thus, the Datastore has to be somewhere independent of Host A and Host B (which is where the Synology Rackstation was supposed to come into play).

Site B is meant to be a disaster recovery (DR) site. Upon failure of the entire site, then Host C located in Site B is meant to be powered on manually and those VMs located at site A should be accessible in Site B because we intend to use the replication feature of Veeam Backup and Replication to send replications of the VMs to Site B.

What we did

We setup the Synology Rackstation to be an iSCSI target, with the thought that it would be then accessible by both Host A and Host B , however, it is only accessible by the first come (which was Host A in this case).

My question is; is this really the best way to go about setting up what we wish to achieve? If yes, then what did we do wrong (of course you can request more details and i'll provide as best as i can). If it is the wrong way we went about it, please advise the right way (using the current equipment we have)

mzhaase
  • 3,778
  • 2
  • 19
  • 32
Razoe
  • 1
  • 1

1 Answers1

1

You have a couple of options here:

  1. VSphere HA, requires VSphere Standard Edition
  2. VSphere FT, also requires Standard and limited to two (Enterprise Edition: 4) vCPU
  3. Veeam B&R can do Replication, requires VCenter Essentials
  4. Do it like you have planned it.

All these options have their pros and cons, easiest for you is probably 3. But it requires more space directly on the hosts. Here is a short breakdown:

VSphere HA

  • requires VSphere license
  • VM stored on SAN
  • If VM on primary host stops, VSphere recreates and restarts it on the second host, no intervention required

VSphere FT

  • VSphere Fault Tolerance runs and syncrhonizes the same VM simultaneously on two machines. There is no downtime if one Hypervisor fails.
  • VMs stored on the Hypervisors
  • Hypervisors should have 10G communication
  • Only 2 vCPU, or 4 in VCenter Enterprise

Veeam B&R Replication

  • Also needs VCenter standard because it uses VMWare API
  • Veeam has Replication build in. This does exactly what you want to do, it replicates a VM to a second Host and starts it when necessary.
  • Works on schedule, VMs are not replicated live.
  • Stores VMs directly on the Hosts

FT and Replication need additional HDD space on the Hosts. If you want to go with the SAN solution you can progress exactly like you said, you simply need to enable multi session support for the iSCSI target on your Synology. If thats not supported by the synology, you can add the target to the Hypervisor when the other crashes, it doesn't take very long. Keep in mind with this approach you still need to import all the VMs, something that Veeam, HA, etc. do for you.

Community
  • 1
mzhaase
  • 3,778
  • 2
  • 19
  • 32
  • Doesn't it need shared storage to do all of that? This would be something I'd like to try but only have local storage at Site B. – Travis Apr 12 '17 at 14:37
  • 1
    Not really, you would have your NAS at site A, and then the VMs would be replicated to site B, stored locally on the ESXi datastore there. – mzhaase Apr 13 '17 at 10:33