Hello, I look after a relatively small VM environment: Vsphere 5, ESXi 5:150 Vms, 4500 users, 2 datacenters split either side of the county, each with 3 esx hosts, fibre channel presentation to HP EVA SAN (currently migrating to NEXSAN) Native 2008R2 with no chance of a 2012 upgrade.
The issue we have is I am in logger heads with a colleague, who wants to MSCS cluster the FILE an Home and Print servers on each datacenter. We have already Microsoft clustered the SQL.
MSCS clustering is great in a physical environment, but do we want to MSCS cluster our main servers?. In my opinion this turns the seamless VM environment, migrating from host to host, into a more time consuming task (failing over nodes, switcing off vms and cold migrating.) Not to mention the fact that you must use RDMs and cant use VMDKs for snapshots, backups etc.
We have no chance of upgrading to server 2012, we are stuck with 2008R2 due to licence issues.
My argument is that does the benefit, outweigh the hassle?
Is it really necessary? or can we live with Vmware HA?
I would appreciate people feedback, experience and advise on this one.
Many thanks