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  • 1.  Best setup for small HA cluster with 2 ESXI hosts

    Posted Dec 10, 2023 06:01 PM

    Hi everyone,

    I'm looking for advice regarding a small cluster setup for high availability. The goal is failover without fault tolerance, which allows the VMs to perform most maintenance and failure cases after reboot.

    I have 2 servers and a rackstation. I'd like to use the integrated SSD RAID as datastore, and leave the NAS as a backup (with HDD RAID), but i need some suggestions regarding the shared datastore for high availability.

    I would like to get maximum performance from this setup while ensuring resilience. What do you suggest? Thanks



  • 2.  RE: Best setup for small HA cluster with 2 ESXI hosts

    Posted Dec 10, 2023 06:33 PM

    Hello, 

    If you are using two servers and would like to not use something external for backend storage, then my suggestion would be to set the up as VSAN nodes with an external witness.  This would be the best way to get shared storage between them without something external. The witness could even be on something small like a Raspberry PI. However, to be VSAN, you do need a specific disk configuration. 



  • 3.  RE: Best setup for small HA cluster with 2 ESXI hosts

    Posted Dec 10, 2023 07:37 PM

    Thanks for the reply.

    I have a vmware Essentials Plus 8 license.

    If I'll use the NAS as a shared NFS datastore (HDD RAID 1), would the local SSD datastores only be used for the esxi hosts and vcenter? Would VMs lose a lot in terms of performance and IOPS compared to a dedicated SAN with SSD?

    As an alternative, could I use vMotion without HA and live migrate them to the second host when needed? Or - found it online - use a dedicated datastore on the second host and share it; but is this safe to do (only esxi 1 power loss will be supported)?

    Thanks

     

     



  • 4.  RE: Best setup for small HA cluster with 2 ESXI hosts

    Posted Dec 10, 2023 08:11 PM

    You can use NAS storage as share storage and put your machines on that. in addition, you can install ESXi on the local SSD on each ESXi server. regarding the vCenter server, you can install it on the local datastore (on ESXi1 or ESXi2) or on NAS share storage. 
    you can vMotion your machines without enabling HA in the cluster. keep this point in mind, vCenter needs up and running for live migration. 

    Would VMs lose a lot in terms of performance and IOPS compared to a dedicated SAN with SSD? In my opinion and the experiences I have had, yes. 



  • 5.  RE: Best setup for small HA cluster with 2 ESXI hosts

    Posted Dec 10, 2023 07:25 PM

    It seems the only solution for you, is vSAN with 2-node. you can connect the vSAN network directly between the two hosts without the need for 10 Gb or higher switches. both hybrid and all-flash deployments are supported, so you can use SSD for all-flash deployment.