One Solution for VMFS-3 Woes...

Today I read an interesting article titled VMFS-3, How Do I Despise Thee by Jason Perlo. It was a very interesting article because of the woes that I have also observed with the black box VMWare Hypervisor and VMFS. One possible solution would have been to use Sun's Unified Storage to host the VMs and share via NFS. You could use the built-in replication feature to replicate the entire volume to the remote data center. When you wanted to fail-over to the remote data center, all you would need to do within the remote data center is clone the volume and start up the ESX servers that would already be pointing at the Unified Storage server in that data center. In addition to taking advantage of replication in this way, you could also take advantage of many of Unified Storage's other great benefits such as:

• Regular scheduled snapshots.
• Sharing a single filesystem that is accessible via multiple network protocols such as CIFS, NFS, http (WebDAV), ftp, and sftp.
• In depth performance analysis through real time analyitcs.
• Clustering for in data center high availability.
• Active Directory integration for CIFS user and group shares.
• LDAP integration for NFS shares.

If you are not familiar with Unified Storage, you can download the free simulator and get familiar with all of its features before investing in purchasing one of the Unified Storage servers. Further, through Sun's Try and Buy offer, you could try out a Unified Storage server for a fixed period of time before purchasing it.

Hopefully this option will forearm you on future rescue missions to give the customer a viable alternative to hand delivery of USB attached drives.

Brad