John:
If the ISCSI array fails, you're screwed. That being said though, there should be enough redundancy in the array so that a component or two can fail without impacting the array, and hopefully your support contract means the vendor will be out to fix it within a matter of hours from when you call them. If you've got redundant power supplies, redundant controllers and RAID'd disks you should be fine there.
Do you need a backup server? That depends on what you're doing and what options you bought. VMWare has a HA (high availability) feature so that if one ESX host fails, VMWare detects that and brings up the VMs that were running on the failed host on the working machine. So for what you've got, it doesn't sound like you need a backup server assuming you have the HA option.
Ryan
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of John G. Heim
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 4:04 PM
To: Blind sysadmins list
Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] vmware overview
Do we still need a backup server? What if the ISCSI array fails? Is our
operating system gone then?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Hodgson"
Hi,
You cluster the Vmware not the guest operating system. So, if you have the available licenses, you would configure Vmware to put the virtual machines on the Iscsi array, then using the ESX server manager set up the Vmware cluster/Vmotion so that if one of the machines dies in the cluster, it will come up on the other ESX box.
Andrew.
-----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of John G. Heim Sent: 13 October 2008 22:39 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] vmware overview
My department bought 2 Sun servers and an ISCSI array. We've installed esx on both machines nad set up a 3rd machine as a vmwarevirtual center server.
What next?
My opinion is that we would want to set up a cluster and install Solaris on the cluster. But my co-worker has already installed solaris as a virtual
machine on one of the Sun servers. Doesn't that mean we have lost the flexability we'd get from having a cluster?
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