Multi VIP whitepaper

[prcoen]

Olvi, it won't work - even if you only have one VIP set up, it knows about the target gateways assigned to the other subnet. Remember, there's only one gateway per target. Not one per site, only one. A VIP in subnet A will gladly direct a host to a target/volume gateway in subnet B if that's where it's located. And gateway assignment is made when the first host connects to that target. If you had three sites, each with a set of the data, only one of those has a gateway for any given target on a local storage node.

So if you've stretched the ESX cluster between the sites, servers on one side will be connecting to storage on the other side.

The only way what you describe could work is if the VMware iSCSI traffic was routed.

FT can help, but you don't need shared storage for that. VMware HA does NOT see a storage failure as an HA event. Having the iSCSI disks drop out from under the host won't trigger a VM (or host) shutdown and a relaunch of the VM on another host.

[Olvi_1]

Damn!

Thanks prcoen, point taken.


-Olvi

[teledata]

I've been posting here for a while, and every time the multi-site discussion comes up, the end of the discussion conclusion is: HP NEEDS to build a better plug in to allow for a Multi-Site setup that communicates with the vStorage API of vSphere to allow multipathing, and some intelligent storage routing.

We're up to 9.0 and no change in the method of connectivity so far.

HP SAN/iQ DEVELOPMENT? HELLO, ARE YOU OUT THERE?

[prcoen]

Yeah, that's the same conclusion I've come to over the past few months. I guess the big question is whether or not it makes sense for them to aim for a driver in vSphere 4.1, or to aim for whatever vSphere 5.0 is going to do.