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I'm having a hard time understanding shared storage for high availability in vSphere. I have the following kit:

  • 1 x Mac mini (ESXi 5.5 - part of vSphere)
  • 1 x White box PC (ESXi 5.5 - part of vSphere with Fibre HBA)
  • 1 x HP ProLiant Microserver (Nexentastor)

I want to be able to use vMotion and HA between both ESXi hosts. However, I wish to use Fibre Channel on white White box PC and iSCSI on the Mac mini (I would happily add a fibre HBA to the Mac mini if I could - damn mac mini).

I am currently able to see LUNs presented from Nexentastor on both iSCSI and Fibre Channel and am able to create VMFS5 datastores. The problem I am having is mounting the same datastore (presented on the same LUN) on both Fibre Channel and iSCSI so both ESXi hosts can leverage vMotion and HA.

It may be that this isn't possible. If anyone has any alternative ideas, please let me know. I've already thought about having to ditch Fibre Channel and go fully iSCSI - which isn't ideal as I would have to purchase more NICs or iSCSI HBAs.

Side notes:

  • For anyone trying a configuration like this, I had appalling write speeds using Nexentastor. By enabling Sync on the RAID volume and disabling Sync on the separate Zvols, write speeds shot through the roof. Not sure what implications this may present but it works.
  • I have left out verbose networking information as no one wants to read through shed loads of it on here. ;) We can assume that the networking is fine in this case.

Thanks for your help.

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This is soooooo wrong... mismatched hosts, protocols, design, etc.

But the reason solution here:

Use NFS with NexentaStor for VMware

That way, both of your hosts will be able to see your storage.

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  • I totally agree with you on your first statement, but I can't do much with a home lab. ;) Thanks for your answer.
    – user259430
    Dec 12, 2014 at 19:00

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