Vsphere 5 HA feature doubt

[aruntvm]

Hello friends,i am new in vmware world and i have a doubt.

   I installed two esxi5 boxes and vsphere 5 server and planning to test Clustering.My requirement is that i want the same vmdk stored in two storage locations,for make it clear i have an XP os and i want to store its vmdk in two locations,the purpose is to make working the virtual Xp even one of the storage is down and i am wondering there will be data replication between these hdds..

Note:

esxi 1....192.168.1.110

esxi..2...192.168.1.111

vsphere server ....192.168.1.120

currently i am using the local storage of esxi for storing vmdk

when we do HA,one esxi will be master and the other will be slave and i can only store the vmdk in any one location,and i can see that if that storage location fails..the vm machine will be down.I am wordering that if i can store the vmdk in two storages and there will be data replication between them,then if one storage and one esxi goes down the 2nd storage and esxi will continue working...I know my question may be stupid...but as i said i a new in this virtual world....

     Thank you

      Arun

[RvdNieuwendijk]

I moved your question from "VI: VMware ESX 3.5" to "VMware ESXi 5".

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

HA (automatic restart after failures) requires shared storage where one host can restart a VM from the same datastore location as it ran prior to e.g. a host failure. To be able to restart the VM from the other storage, the storage would need a failover mechanism (manually or transparent), i.e. the datastores on the replicated site are accessibly after a storage failure on the source side.

If you don't have storage replication, you may take a look at VMware's replication which has been added to vSphere 5.1 (previously only available with Site Recovery Manager). The version shipped with vSphere allows to manually failover to the replicated VM.

André

[TomHowarth]

If you do not have shared storage between the two nodes (ESXi Servers) then you will not be able to configure HA or vMotion or DRS,  these are a requirement.