Stretched Clustering Presentation

Tuesday, May 10, 2011 in Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 5 comments

On May 5, I had the privilege of speaking in Charlotte, NC, at the Carolina VMware User’s Summit. I had been asked to deliver a presentation on the pros and cons of stretched clusters in VMware vSphere. Since I know that not everyone could make it to Charlotte, here’s a copy of the presentation I gave. It’s hosted via Sliderocket. Enjoy, and feel free to post any questions or suggestions in the comments to this post. Thanks!

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  1. Sketch’s avatar

    Sketch on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 8:05 am

    Just what I was looking for. Thanks!

  2. Dan’s avatar

    Dan on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 12:54 pm

    Hi,

    Nice read. Thanks! :)

    What about latency. Both in storage and in networking. Isn’t it a big factor?

  3. Ivan Pepelnjak’s avatar

    Ivan Pepelnjak on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 2:02 pm

    You forgot to mention one of the major caveats of stretched clusters: if the DCI link goes down, you lose half of the cluster (due to “isolated host” syndrome) and all its VMs.

    Not to mention what might happen if the storage or cluster goes into split-brain mode. Seen that, not nice at all.

  4. Dustin Pike’s avatar

    Dustin Pike on Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    Thanks for posting this up Scott. This was a great presentation in a day full of knowledge that was given at the Carolina Summit. It was very nice being able to attend your presentation and chat with you one on one after the Cloud Panel Discussion.

    I look forward to catching up again soon.

  5. Nuno’s avatar

    Nuno on Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:29 pm

    Hi,

    this is a very interesting topic, we have deployed of a stretched cluster over dark fiber as we have nodes from both sides accessing both storage’s (1 per site) … L2 is a requirement to allow inter-site vm movements ..

    the most important thing would be to balance the HA nodes to avoid split-brain scenarios .. i do not know why VMware does not support it officially as the technology and the product robustness is there.

    in terms of backups we use D2D2T and we rely on LUN/RDM presentation for the VM backup directly to the D2D.

    whilst is is a cool feature, as we can predifine where VMs can vmotion and which hosts should failover to other hosts … it becomes a complex task to manage once the enviroment grows.

    regards,

    Nuno

    regards,

    N