Hello,I'm relatively new to VMware but hoping that someone can help me or point me in the right direction for the information i need to assist with configuring HA for selected VMs.
In our current setup we have two relatively small VMware hosts that are mainly using local storage for the VMs. These two hosts are on the same LAN but in different comms rooms seperated by a dark fibre link.
We have recently added a vCenter server with the intention to use vMotion to move servers between the two hosts and vSphere replication for the more important VMs. But we understand that to do this the vCenter server has to always be available.
To overcome this we have connected the two VMware hosts to some SAN storage via FC that we have available in each of the comms rooms and presented this as storage to the two hosts. So for example in Comms room A we have VM Host A connected to SAN A and in Comms room B we have VM Host B connected to SAN B. The vCenter server VM is currently hosted on VM Host A & SAN A. This VM is replicated to SAN B at the hardware level by the SAN. Whilst SAN B is attached to Host B the vCenter VM data will only be read only until we tell the SAN controller what is the primary data. Does vSphere interact with the SAN to do this automatically and where is this configured? Is this part of the HA configuration?
Basically we want to use this small amount of SAN storage to keep our vCenter server always available if we were to lose one of the Hosts or one of the Comms rooms. Is this something that someone has configured and could point me in the right direction?
I have added the two hosts into a vCenter cluster (although i haven't enabled DRS or HA yet) but we only want to selectively keep the vCenter server VM as the only VM that is using HA for the time being. Is this possible and how?
We are using vSphere 5.1 U1 and vCenter Server 5.5.
Thanks a lot for any help.