Ability to mirror two FreeNAS servers

[rickh925]

After having a raid Z2 array fail and then limp along with two of the 6 disks offline after rebooting, I am thinking about ways to make my ESXi storage more fault tolerant.

Is it possible to use two or more FreeNAS servers with VMware ESXi 5.x connected via iSCSI (or any other protocol) such that the FreeNAS physical servers are actually mirrored? I'm thinking of a way to do something like RAID 1 across servers?

Or, is it possible for the VMware servers to write to a primary FreeNAS server and that primary server syncs with another server in real time?

I can always to go for a solution in the same physical server but would like to be able to have fault tolerance at the physical layer (CPU, mobo, RAM).

I'm thinking redundancy a la belt and suspenders. Any suggestions or recommendations?

Thanks

 

[cyberjock]

You could do zfs replication from one FreeNAS machine to another. Keep in mind that adds more I/Os when it runs, so you run the risk of very high iSCSI latency issues causing esxi issues.

Why/how did you get 2 failed disks? Normally 2 failed disks is either really bad luck or neglect on monitoring and maintaining the zpool.

 

[paleoN]

I'm thinking of a way to do something like RAID 1 across servers?

You are looking for HAST + CARP. At this point I wouldn't attempt it on the 8.x versions. You would have to redo it for 9.x. In fact CARP might have changed to uCARP under 9.x and possibly has newer HAST code. To be honest I haven't been following it.

The setup for this is complex and fiddly. You need to do extensive testing before you consider such to be "robust."

 

[RegularJoe]

can the replicated pool be located so that the NFS/SAMBA shares look and mount identical, just different host name and IP address?