XenServer HA (failover VM's) without shared storage

Question

In the university from Uruguay where I work, we have 2 IBM BladeCenter S with 4 server blades each one. Each blade have XenServer 6.2 installed and working.

Our idea is have each BladeCenter in different builds (connected) to have failover.

Each BladeCenter chassis, have fibre channel storage embedded in the chassis and, a priori, I don't find how to share this storage to the other BladeCenter chassis.

Also, I know the shared storage way isn't the best, because it implements a single point of fail...

So, I need to find a way to do high availability with XenServer 6.2, without shared storage. I found http://www.halizard.com/, but I want to know other alternatives to have HA without shared storage.

The other thing I can think of, is if I could mirror the storages by network (with iSCSI), and multipath the iSCSI targets as 1, or have multipathing iSCSI and Fibre Channel (but I don't know if this exists). If this is possible, the XenServer HA implementation will work.

Hope we can help me!

Solution 1

Hi You may try Xen DRBD to achieve HA without shared storage...

http://www.drbd.org/users-guide/ch-xen.html

https://github.com/locatrix/xs-pacemaker

-Asit

Solution 2

If you an attach enough local storage you can build your own iSCSI HA-solution.

Reiceipe: - drbd > 8.2.x - tgtd

Set up two local VMs that replicate two LVs onto each other in drbd dual primary mode. Use each local iscsi target. In XEN-server make sure to use eacch target in active/passive mode (no rr!).