Comments on: VMware Fault Tolerance = RAID 1

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:57:04 +0000

I don’t know to me it seems even worse then RAID1, considering some of the requirements I was reading. For example when using NFS the the two VMs need to be on the same share and I think when using VMFS they need to be on the same volume. To me that’s like having RAID1 where your mirroring partitions on a single hard drive. I’m no ESX expert so feel free to enlighten me but how is that any different then VMotion?

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:11:31 +0000

This sounds like the LockStep technology I heard about back in February 2008. I heard about it and instantly thought about using it instead of MS Clustering for our main Database. Thanks Bob for mentioning this, now I have to go and learn about more VMWare fun!! :)

By: Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:37:31 +0000

Depends heavily on why you’re clustering. If you are doing it to handle hardware unavailability it might be a good solution.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:16:10 +0000

This eliminates the need for clustering at the OS level, doesn’t it? Or am I missing something?

By: Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:39:10 +0000

Yeah, it looks like it’s exactly that.

By: Roger Lund

Roger Lund — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:42:38 +0000

Interesting, so think of Fault Tolerance as protection from a hardware fault.