I certainly welcome and appreciate your contribution, PoSaP.Guys, sorry for interrupting your discussion, but I think you forgot about one thing, wallewek.
While copying, you have three files in StarWind folder, one *.img and *.swdsk, *.swdsk_HA, header file and headers different for both host.
I hadn't really "forgotten" about the potential differences between the host files. I was wondering how they affected the process. StarWind support seems to say storage replacement rebuild is a simple copy, but copying what, to where, is not clear to me.
Copying the actual contents of a VSAN virtual image seems both obvious and unnecessary, as synchronization handles that -- once it can be persuaded to start. But it seems we first need prepare the host storage properly before, sync will recognize it as a replica to be synced.
Copying the contents of the physical host storage being replaced, so that sync will accept it (reminds me of organ transplant rejection), raises a couple of key questions:
1. is it really necessary to copy complete image files (which appears to require the cluster to be down during that long copy), given that the replication/sync will immediately overwrite them? My attempts to avoid this have so far failed (and these were using the "failed" host's own files -- I haven't tried a cross-host copy yet), so I'm going to try a complete copy. I haven't decided yet from which host.
2. In a true hardware failure recovery situation, the original StarWind files would be lost on one host. Can we really manually copy the whole works from the other host? To me, that's what Boris's comments seem to imply. There's apparently no script, commands or documentation to deal with this, in the absence of the licensed StarWind management GUI. So your point is right on: are there, say, edits to the metadata that need to be done, if we copy files from one host to another? Boris's comments seem to say not. I've been meaning to look in them to see what might require it.
It's interesting that this doesn't appear to have been discussed here in any detail previously.
I've been taking the approach that one should be able to somehow replace a failed host using the remaining host, without using the StarWind GUI. Maybe I should give up on that whole approach, and make occasional host backups that I can use to restore each entire host, even though I'm already backing up all the guests individually. Talk about redundant redundancy.
PoSaP, if you have specific suggestions as to what post-copy metadata edits might be needed, would you mind posting them here?
-- Ken