VSA in remote office?

[Paul Hutchings]

We have VSA licenses that came with the P4500.

I have a remote office whose server is about to be replaced. The obvious choice is to use vSphere, but the choices seem to be between a regular VMDK on local disks, or putting in a VSA and putting the VM on that and as well as "normal" backup processes, have the VSA do remote snapshots over the VPN link back to one of our main P4000 clusters.

The VPN link is 20mbps.

Is anyone doing this and if so how have you found it please?

[teledata]

I did this for a bank (re-purposed legacy DAS into VSAs for their off site replica SAN, which they used VMware site recovery with)

There is a challenge to putting the VMs on the same host as the VSA though. That is during a reboot the VSA won't be up yet, so auto-start will not function as expected. (there was a work-around script that was developed on the forums here, but I would have to find it).

Otherwise after the VSA comes up you can always manually re-start the hosted VMs.

[Paul Hutchings]

Thanks and yes that makes sense.

I suspect the way to go would be to put the entire VM on the P4000.

Like you said, when the ESX host reboots (not often hopefull!) it would require a storage rescan but other than that I don't see there should be any significant issues should there?