Real Time Replication and Failover for VMware
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@anonymous said:
@brianlittlejohn No, I am asking if you have ever lost a host, and had the systems stay up?
Without shared storage or VSA, you cant have live failover, I don't think.
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@anonymous said:
@DustinB3403 VMware is already installed. They have data center licencing on both hosts. VMware is Essential Plus.
You'll be reinstalling either way, though, right? No matter what licensing they have paid for, that's technical debt. Is there any reason to keep it? Even if VMware is free, I'm not aware of there being any value to keeping it except for "it's already there" but since you need to reinstall for your clustering, that does not appear to apply here.
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@Dashrender said:
@anonymous said:
@brianlittlejohn No, I am asking if you have ever lost a host, and had the systems stay up?
Without shared storage or VSA, you cant have live failover, I don't think.
Nope, because when the one unit dies, the data is inaccessible and the other host has no means to grab it once it is already offline.
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@scottalanmiller said:
since you need to reinstall for your clustering, that does not appear to apply here.Why would I need to reinstall? o_0
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller said:
since you need to reinstall for your clustering, that does not appear to apply here.Why would I need to reinstall? o_0
In order to enable share or VSA storage.
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@anonymous said:
It seems VMware vSphere Essentials has vSphere vMotion, but can I use it without shared storage or a VSA?
Ideally they want to use all local storage.
You should have Storage vMotion that will let you do this. But that is useless once one of the hosts as failed.
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Veeam will do replication and failover, if you have that. That's probably the cheapest and simplest solution for a 2 host setup.
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Huh?
Two hosts with Hyper-V will do replication for free... You just don't get instant failover or 100% data.
You loose data since last sync... And had to wait for the boot. -
@Carnival-Boy said:
Veeam will do replication and failover, if you have that. That's probably the cheapest and simplest solution for a 2 host setup.
Starwind is free. And it doesn't have the downtime or the data loss. Hard to beat "all the best features" and "free".
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@Dashrender said:
Huh?
Two hosts with Hyper-V will do replication for free... You just don't get instant failover or 100% data.
You loose data since last sync... And had to wait for the boot.Yes, Hyper-V now does all of the VMware ESXi + Veeam features for free and included. You can do the Hyper-V or ESXi + Starwind approach which is better completely for free in either case (in the situation where they already bought the licensing like they did.)
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However it must be noted....
The best possible solution on VMware here is Starwind. The same solution with Hyper-V works better. This is definitely a case where even "already paid for" VMware is holding us back and not delivering as much, even when all this money has been spent, as Hyper-V.
Using VMware here would be falling to the "sunk cost fallacy." That money has already been spent on it doesn't matter. Working with what we have to work with today, the VMware licensing is unfortunate but already wasted. Hyper-V is the better solution for this.
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Starwind doesn't do backups though does it? So if you are already using Veeam for backups, the replication bit is effectively "free" here.
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Or equally good depending on some other factors, XenServer + HA-Lizard. Recent tests from @dengelhardt showed that he was getting 20% better performance from XS over the VMware machines that he was replacing. So you get lower technical debt and better performance plus more features and no licensing restrictions all at once.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Starwind doesn't do backups though does it? So if you are already using Veeam for backups, the replication bit is effectively "free" here.
I didn't say that it wasn't "Free", I said that it was not as good as "free" should be. It isn't good enough to use anymore because all of the negatives are shared by both solutions and both are free, but Starwind does full failover and full replication so no downtime, no dataloss.
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You had mentioned that Veeam was the cheapest, but it is at best only equal in cost to the standard option but does not do nearly as much. If Veeam incurs any cost at all, like paying for an update or maintenance, then even if paid for for the current version, it's not actually free. I believe that the functionality for this is in a free version of Veeam, but even free costs too much in this case
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I just figured that if the OP had Veeam for backups already then using it for replication might be good. It was a suggestion, I wasn't trying to start another argument. I was just trying to help.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I just figured that if the OP had Veeam for backups already then using it for replication might be good. It was a suggestion, I wasn't trying to start another argument. I was just trying to help.
Not arguing, just pointing out that while Veeam used to be a viable solution for these cases before Starwind was around OR if the OP did not already have Essentials Plus, it no longer is in these cases (or it pushes you to Hyper-V as it is completely free there on both sides.)
It's tempting to use Veeam here because of sunk cost, sunk effort or other "it is already in house" ideas, but these all leave you with having lost a lot - and would not utilize the Essentials Plus license, not that that isn't a sunk cost, but it highlights the issue.
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Well, if it was me, I'd use Veeam.
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Veeam should absolute be used in this case for backup... But not for replication. Using Veeam for replication actually puts your environment at more risk because it's not a real time replication like Starwind. And since Starwind is free for two hosts.... Why not use the best product?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Well, if it was me, I'd use Veeam.
Why? It's all negatives, no benefits. Just to be stubborn? Would you be okay telling the owner of the company that you intentionally avoided protecting the data from loss, downtime and forcing crash consistency instead of full consistency?
I know that you are trying to make a point. But as you've not mentioned any reason why this isn't just risky, I don't understand why you'd take this stand.
