Hi all.
After a week of reading and studying I'm coming close to a conclusion on how to set up my VMware hosts and VMs. But One thing I am having doubts about, and was hoping you professionals can give me a few good pointers
My current Home Lab setup is on one physical HPE server.
- ESXi on bootable USB.
- 1 x 250GB datastore (most VMs are installed here)
- 3 x 8 TB RAW
One of the VMs installed on the 250 GB datastore is a Synology NAS server. The 3 x 8 TB RAW are assigned to this VM. Synology is configured with Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) with data protection with 1 disk fault-tolerance. (16 TB usable storage and 8 TB standby if one disk should give errors or become faulty).
In ESXi I have assigned a folder on the NAS as datastore as well. Here I have stored both OS-iso's and a few VMs.
Questions:
1)
From what I understood I can run "Starwind vSAN Free" to create a HA 2-node setup. I am planning on setting up a second physical HPE server with the same hard disk configuration. Now, where I am having my doubts is how to deal with the 3 x 8 TB RAW. Is "Starwind vSAN Free" duplicating "AS-IS" (read "chinese copy")? And if so, wouldn't this be a waist of 8 TB disk space? Meaning, I am running a form of RAID, and now the RAId is going to be duplicated. if I should set up a "No-Raid" NAS with 3 x 8 TB = 24 TB "Starwind vSAN Free" would duplicate it 100% anyway?
2)
The other thing I assume from my findings is that the 2-node solution is working when using VMware vSphere (where I use the vSphere client on Windows to connect to my ESXi server). But how will this work when I manage my host and VMs with the vCenter appliance installed on my host?
3)
Taking it one step further: If I was to install VMware Horizon and the associated required modules on host A, would my 2-node "Starwind vSAN Free" solution still be the way to go for my Home Lab ?
4)
I'm confused about the fact if I really need a vSAN to achieve the above. The term HA and vSAN keeps popping up in pair in every article I find, while my understanding is that strictly taken a vSAN is (from Google: VMware vSAN™ aggregates local or direct-attached data storage devices to create a single storage pool shared across all hosts in the vSAN cluster.) But that is not what I am looking for.... I guess ... ...
5)
When looking at how a backup solution would be planned into this setup, I would think this is going to require an additional physical server with minimum 24TB hard disk space to store the backup files on to. Or a cloud based storage (I have unlimited storage space on my web server...)
So there you have it. Points 1 2 3 and 4 are at the very least local installs and where I need to understand how this will work with "Starwind vSAN Free". Point 5 is a little bonus where I would appreciate it to get your insight
Many thanks in advance for reading this !
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