Failover, what is required (HowTo get Failover)

[mburkhardt]

Hello, I have a question:

I have to install the following standards:

2 Hardware VMWare Server ESXI 5

1 Data SAN Statorage

The system shall provide the following requirements:

One Server (ESXi5) is Online and hosts the VM's (one or two) that are installed on the iSCSI SAN DataStorage (Windows 2003) . The Second Server (ESXi5) is running but hosts no VM. If the first Server (Online) has a Hardware problem, the second Server should adopt the online part and has to host the VM's that ar installed on the iSCSI SAN DataStorage.

And I want to switch manually between the two server, because I have to detect the Hardwareproblem!

Now my question:

What architecture do I have to build, what Hardware and Software is required?

Thanks beforehand

Greetings from Germany

[weinstein5]

There are a number of options - if you have vcenter and are licensed for VMware HA you can automate the fail over - HA will detect if the host is not responding and restart the VMs for you automatically. Another option also reuirng vcenter would be VMware FT that that creates a shadow VM on the second host and if the first host fails the shadow VM picks up the load with no down time.

If you do not have vcenter than it will have to be done manually - you will have to manually add the vms to the second host by browsing the datastores with vsphere client and adding the vM to the hosts inventory.