Hi All,
We have just experienced a power failure on the street where our main business resides, so our VM hosts along with the SAN's and everything else powered off before we had time to gracefully shut things down!
I have got it all going again, but it wasn't straight forward and upon writing my DR report I've come to question some of my earlier decisions and whether or not I should change anything.
My main issue was that the vCenter server was virtualised. It was a bit of a faff connecting to the correct host and then firing up Vcenter and reconnecting to this server for the VI. In hindsight better documentation of our systems would have helped, but I am just wondering if I could make life easier by somehow auto starting the vCenter server once the hosts start? Although when I connected directly to the host I needed to rescan my iSCSI datastores (of which the vCenter lives) so I'm not sure if this would actually work or not? Does anybody have any better ideas? Should I run another vCenter remotely for example?
My other problem came about questioning whether or not I could easily recover from a real disaster if my primary SAN failed. Currently we have 2 SANs and they are bonded and performing asynchronous copies from SAN 1 to SAN 2, so in the event of SAN 1 not starting I could flip to SAN 2 as it would be an exact copy of everything I have on SAN 1, including vCenter for starters. My unknown here is that ofcourse, I have never tried this!!! And I'm not convinced it would work either. Presumably SAN 2 would have different iSCSI fqn's that none of my VM Hosts would have ever seen before. So how would it connect to SAN 2 when there is no vCenter running to initiate the rescan or initial connection? And then after it somehow connects would it present me with with new, but the same, datastores (if that makes sense)? And it would see all of the VM's on the datastores, I would be able to start them, but they would be copies, so in vCenter I would have duplicated VM's?
Sorry but this is just as confusing to write let alone read it! I am thinking now that I should move vCenter to a physical box to protect me from the 'eggs all in one basket' scenario. Has anybody else recovered from a similar SAN failure and if so what did you do?
Thanks in advance
Stuart