I am looking for some guidance or a recommendation to eliminating single point of failure down to the SAN which provides storage to vSphere environment.
Previously I looked into OpenFiler because of its iSCSI accommodations, because it is Open Source, and because is comes packaged with DRBD and Heartbeat. While I was able to configure OpenFiler as a HA SAN, it seemed brittle and performing a failback along with other issues proved it would not be a dependable solution.
Is there a recommended alternative in a Windows or Linux environment that would accommodate high availability? What are some options that would allow two identical physical servers with specs mentioned below to provide redundancy if one storage server were to fail? Does Windows Server 2k8 have a block replication feature that I am unaware of?
Shared storage where an iSCSI target server in cluster mode that defers its storage to a separate physical SAN just seems like it is deferring the single point of failure further downstream.
Specs (2x):
2U
3Ware 9550SXU
8gig memory
8 drives (4 raid1 configuration)
Two nic gigabit
AMD Opteron
Asus M2N WS Pro
W2k8 (Storage Server, or whatever)
Thanks for your participation!