What do I need for HA and VMWare?

Steveocee · 17 Nov 2017 at 11:47

Hello,

I can't seem to put my finger on the right information so I'll explain what's happening and see if anyone can shed some light on it for me.

Currently we have 4 HP DL380G7's all machines are equally specced.

We have machine 1 running ESXi free for some "non-essential" services on VM's as a test of ESXi and to see how we got on with the software with the hope of machine 2 being a failover (then found esxi can't do this)

We have machine number 3 also doing similar, running some "other" services with a free version of ESXi and machine number 4 powered off as it was going to be used as a failover also.

My "grand" idea was to pool all 4 machines into 1 resource, I'm fairly sure this is possible from another thread I've seen but am wondering exactly what I'd need to propose to do this?

I appreciate we'd need some VMWare licenses to do this and this could work out quite expensive as each machine is dual processor (2 hex core's in each).
Also what about the HA option? Do they need to have some kind of networked storage or can the storage of the machines themselves be used?

Please throw some ideas at me.

Steveocee · 17 Nov 2017 at 13:27

If we needed to buy something SAN and it is a justifiable advantage then there is no reason why we wouldn't do that. This will ultimately be running some very dependant production systems on if it is applied correctly.

Steveocee · 27 Nov 2017 at 14:27

For the purpose of this. Lets assume all 4 servers are in the same rack with access to the same management network.

Steveocee · 15 Dec 2017 at 11:43

Hi everyone,

So I've harvested all of the ideas posed and off the back of it have approached a local VMware advertised partner to come in and advise us what they think we need against what we think we want and then critiqued against the advice you guys have given.

It looks like shared storage is the preferred and then using the machines around it clusteres with an essentials license. Although that won't get the HA feature we want it looks to be the first step in the right direction. Once we have the platform up and running we would then look to upgrade to the plus kit where it includes the HA features and then back it up to something else with Veem.

Thank you all for your advice.