High Availability At Its Best

We implemented StarWind VSAN on two dedicated Dell Windows servers, logically sitting between the VMWare front end hosts and the Dell EqualLogic back end SANs. There are two sites connected completely redundantly with stacked switches at both ends and two separate fibers taking two different geographical paths between sites. Each site hosts VMWare hosts, a StarWind server, and a Dell SAN. This solution serves two virtual server clusters which collectively represent the entirety of operations for the end customer's internal and customer-facing services. Previous to implementing StarWind, the existing SAN hardware was being underutilized. The Dell EqualLogic SAN replicated all volumes to an offsite SAN through a direct L2 fiber connection every 5 minutes. The downside here was that if there was a DR scenario, data loss of up to 5 minutes was possible, and the process of mapping existing VMs to replicated iSCSI volumes would have been very tedious. Additionally, a SAN failure would inevitably result in downtime for running VMs in addition to data loss.