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Do Hypervisors Have This Capability?

E

ElectroPulse

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 19, 2013
Messages
129
Hello, all!

I'm looking at the idea of purchasing a couple of servers here at the school I work at.

Currently, we are just using two old computers for running Window Server 2012 R2, and pfSense.

One idea I'm toying with is this: Have both servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 and pfSense, so if one stops working we have a backup.

The question I have about this is: Can you set two servers up with a hypervisor running two VMs, and these VMs are exactly duplicated to another server. One of the servers will be the primary, and will actively be used, while the other sits quietly waiting to be used (or even balancing the load between them? Though in this environment I doubt they would need that). If one shuts down, the other one is automatically promoted to primary, and the load is automatically switched over.

Is this possible? I have never gotten into virtualization in the past, so I apologize if this is general knowledge.

Thanks!
ElectroPulse
 
You'd need some form of shared storage. Hyper-V supports the usual SAN stuff as well as CIFS/SMB storage. Most dedicated NAS boxes can do iSCSI as well as CIFS, so you have options there.
 
Absolutely, as the others have said. For the size you're at, HA would do it, but it might be a waste even for that... having 2 machines running the VMs and manually doing HA for them might be simpler, to be honest, and not cost money.
 
I've always wished vsphere provided a mirrored disk driver as a production option, not just for when doing storage vmotion. FT works great for eliminating single point of failure at the host level, but you are still vulnerable to the underlying SAN/NAS failing. There are ways to do active/active or active/passive storage transparent to vsphere, but they either cost a ton or require all kinds of fiddly bits, or are not really safe (like trying to do iSCSI to an active/active scheme using something like DRBD.) Maybe I am missing something here, but in all my google-fu, I've never found a nice, easy, plug&play solution. If you have a guest OS like Red Hat or FreeBSD that allows an install to mirrored boot disks, you can put one on one datastore and the other on a different datastore and you're good, but not all OS provide this easily or reliably. Am I in fact out to lunch here?
 
Server 2012 also has a duplication feature that will allow you to duplicate a live VM to another Host. Then if the first host goes down, you can spin up the VM on the second host with minimal data loss (depends on the frequency of duplication). This won't be true HA, but it doesn't require a SAN.
 
danswartz said:
I've always wished vsphere provided a mirrored disk driver as a production option, not just for when doing storage vmotion. FT works great for eliminating single point of failure at the host level, but you are still vulnerable to the underlying SAN/NAS failing. There are ways to do active/active or active/passive storage transparent to vsphere, but they either cost a ton or require all kinds of fiddly bits, or are not really safe (like trying to do iSCSI to an active/active scheme using something like DRBD.) Maybe I am missing something here, but in all my google-fu, I've never found a nice, easy, plug&play solution. If you have a guest OS like Red Hat or FreeBSD that allows an install to mirrored boot disks, you can put one on one datastore and the other on a different datastore and you're good, but not all OS provide this easily or reliably. Am I in fact out to lunch here?
Click to expand...

VMCP, coming soon - was announced last year.
 
danswartz said:
Lopo, do you have a link to any article(s)? Thanks...
Click to expand...

I'll see what I can find - the first part of it (HA + APD handling) is now in 5.5, the rest may not be fully public yet, although we talked about it at VMworld some.
 
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