Repository question

[moggyman]

Hi

OK, dumb question time folks and I apologise in advance......

I have a physical server with a RAID 0 'D' drive consisting of 16TB of space. I have a local 3 host cluster and the same on the other end of a WAN. I would like to Backup local VMs to this storage area and I would also like to Replicate remote VMs to it as well. Is it possible to create one storage entity that can be used by both Backup and Replication jobs or do I need to set up different types of repository?

Thanks

[PTide]

Hi,

VMs are replicated to a virtualization host storage, not to a repository. Repositories only keep replica metadata. You can use the same repository for both jobs. However I would recommend you to stay away from RAID 0 on your primary storage.

Thank you

[moggyman]

Hi

Thanks for the reply.

Why stay away from RAID 0? The VMware host storage is a little limited, is there a way to advertise some of my 16TB free space to the cluster so that it can be used for replicated VM storage?

[PTide]

Because

The VMware host storage is a little limited

If you don't have enough space to keep all the VMs that you want to replicate on the DR cluster then the replication will fail as there will be nowhere to place replicas' disks.

Why stay away from RAID 0?

Because a failure of a single drive will destroy the whole array with all data on it.

Is there a way to advertise some of my 16TB free space to the cluster so that it can be used for replicated VM storage?

You can create a separate LUN and present it to the cluster via iSCSI and create a datastore dedicated for replicas only, however I would not recommend doing that either because, again, it makes no sense to keep anything important that you rely on (I believe that replicas truly are) on RAID 0.

Thanks

[moggyman]

Thanks. I appreciate the advice. Thankfully this daft configuration wasn't my idea so I've sent the design back to the person who came up with it and he'll have to re-think.

Thanks