Poor Man's vmotion like setup?

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bobdole369

Gawd
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Jun 27, 2004
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OK so planning an ESXi 5 installation for 2 win2k8 servers, a couple workstation instances and a few application (linux based) boxes.

Will have an openfiler setup for iSCSI on another box containing the images, and a 3rd box which will run backups for the entire network. The 3rd box I was exploring the idea of using for a cold-backup of sorts. The whole idea behind vmotion and HA is attractive but this company cannot possibly afford it. I'd like to know if it would be possible to run a script on the iSCSI box or the 3rd box that would check the availability of the 1st one, and if it became unavailable - issue the commands to shut down the first boxes, and bring them up on the third. Anyone ever done something like that? Of course I'm reinventing the wheel. In any event since the images aren't local, I would assume that should the host up and die, any writes to the drive in transit would not occur.
 
It's possible to do something like this. We use the PowerShell scripting functionality to do a lot of the heavy lifting in such cases. All of the core functionality you are after (polling guest status, starting/stopping VMs, etc.) is available. It's also possible to do a lot of these things on the host itself with shell scripts, but that functionality is unsupported and requires you to enable SSH.
 
don't use OF with ESX5. It'll go very poorly for you. And eat your datas. ALL of them.
 
I'm waiting for 3.0 to get released so I can test LIO-target, but lopoetve is right. Default iSCSI initiator for OF 2.99 and below is SCST, which doesn't have SCSI-3 persistent reservations. Now you can CLI configure OF to use LIO-target, but it's a PITA.

For now, I've succumbed to just setting OF up as an NFS datastore share, which has been working OK.
 
Even worse, the abort handler was changed to make it work with ESX4, but it won't work at all right with 5 (it eventually crashes the kernel). Most of teh time, when it comes back up, it'll have corrupted data.

NFS it works fine :) Fully supported, even.
 
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