Replicate two-way

[SB-User]

Hello,

Just a little Question. Is it possible and supported to Replicate in two Ways?

Host 1: ESX with some VM's (vSphere Essentials)
Host 2: ESX with some VM's (vSphere Essentials)

And now I want to Replicate the VM's to each other Host. Both have their Storage located on a iSCSI Storage.

Thanks a lot!

[Gostev]

Hello - yes, absolutely. Many of our customers are doing exactly this.

[SB-User]

Quick and fine answer.

So actually it is not necessary to use a small iSCSI SAN? Is it allowed to ask what would be better? Performance and Security?
- Shared Storage with Dual Controller and iSCSI 1 Gbit with 2GB Cache
- Local Storage with 512MB Cache for each Host

or

- Shared Storage and Backup to Local Storage on the Hosts.

[Gostev]

The most typical small/branch office deployment for Veeam B&R users seems to be 2 ESX hosts with local storages replicating VMs to each other. Cheapest possible solution providing much better reliability than significantly more expensive cluster with HA, that still cannot do the job if the shared storage goes down, and can only do crash-consistent failovers.

Overall, there's really no sense to use shared storage if your license does not allow for clusters (HA/DRS). Local storage is absolutely fine and sufficient for small deployments (just consider using RAID for redundancy).

[SB-User]

Fine! So I will do so. Thanks!