FOM - How is yours setup?

[Paul Hutchings]

I'm looking at how easy (time and money) it would be to add a physical third site to a P4000 deployment to hold a FOM.

Nodes in Site A and Site B
Single subnet "stretch cluster" to accomodate vSphere MPIO.
Dedicated iSCSI switches.

Given the single subnet, routing from FOM to Site A and Site B would be tricky as it's the same network in both sites.

If the switches are all Procurve MSTP/STP/RSTP *should* sort out port blocking?

Curious how you're all doing this with two sites I'm torn on how to deal with losing the primary site.

Basic potential diagram attached - the links shown as 1gbps between A and C and B and C might only be 100mbps (enough for FOM).

[Mark...]

Hi,
From the h/w perspective you only need a suitable PC with windows XP and VMware player (or whatever it is called) and then the FOM from the s/w cd can be installed and configured.
Mark...

[Paul Hutchings]

"From the h/w perspective you only need a suitable PC with windows XP and VMware player (or whatever it is called) and then the FOM from the s/w cd can be installed and configured.
Mark..."

Thanks Mark. Right now I'm leaning towards a third location with a switch, UPS, and a cheap PC/microserver running Windows or ESXi and the FOM.

How to run the FOM isn't really the issue, it's more the "best practise" that you all follow.

Plan A was simply two sites where the P4000 nodes are, but the more I've read the more I've realised that if I lose the primary site I have a real problem to promote the secondary site (recover quorum seems the only way) hence this looks the better option.

[Mark...]

Hi Paul,
If a loss of service, as in quorum lost and no data access, is not too big a problem then why not use the VM??
If site A goes down, start the VM on a manager on site B. If B goes down start the VM on site A.
If you require the data access to stay on-line then the FOM is probably the way to go.
Hopefully someone else will be able to sort you out on the links aspect.
Mark..

[Paul Hutchings]

Mark,

These things always happen in the middle of the night or a weekend and if I can prevent it for a minimal cost (switches & SFP's) it seems sensible.

I have three switches setup right now, just messing about with Spanning Tree to deal with the network loops but it all seems to work perfectly.