Hi,
Our organization is new to virtualization and will be deploying the following configuration:
Two servers: primary VMWare Server (to be purchased, running 10 VMs (mostly RHEL)) and backup server (already purchased), which will come online only if failure/problems with primary.
iSCSI SAN for shared storage. Backups performed to Buffalo NAS appliance.
We have been using the free vSphere Hypervisor in testing with the VMs on the soon-to-be backup server.
We are well-aware of the advantages of the licensed version and vCenter Server.
However, we would like to continue to use the free Hypervisor and are trying to develop a high availablity/failover strategy with the backup server. I state this relatively, because this is not a time-critical environment that requires immediate availability and zero downtime.
Our current exploratory strategy:
1. Primary server goes down.
2. Start secondary server.
3. Access resource manager and login.
4. Search for and remove any locks on file system datastores (iSCSI reservations?).
5. open VMWare Client.
6. Search for and instantiate VMs that were previously managed on the primary server from shared storage.
We have not tested this and are making a number of assumptions about this process.
Does anyone have experience with this with the free Hypervisor?
Thanks,