ESXi failover from FreeNas server to replicated Freenas server

[Curtipus]

Hey guys,

I know that there is no great Highly Available solution for FreeNAS (HAST+CARP, tell me if I'm wrong), but I'm trying to come up with a failover solution for ESXi that involves minimal manual effort. Does anyone know of a good way to safely failover to a secondary FreeNAS box?

Some of my thoughts:

If there's a serious hardware failure on a "master" FreeNAS box, it seems it would be safe to throw the drives and the boot drive into a "slave" identical server, and we'd be back up pretty quick, so that's fine. The real issue would be what do to if the pool on the master dies. If I'm replicating from one server to the other, then I've got a pretty recent backup (I don't mine losing a few hours of data, even), but the datastore/pool names would all be different from master (or maybe they don't have to be?) and I'd be required to do a lot of manual configuration to setup new shares and networking. I don't think I'd be able to throw the USB boot drive from master into slave in this scenario because it wouldn't understand what to do with the replicated pool. Am I right in thinking this?

Or maybe is there something specific in vCenter Standard 6.5 that I can do to mirror the two FreeNAS servers?

 

[m0nkey_]

High availability is only available in TrueNAS, the commercial arm of iX Systems.

The only option you have is replication. It's not going to be easy to make FreeNAS highly available (it simply wasn't designed for that).

 

[Curtipus]

High availability is only available in TrueNAS, the commercial arm of iX Systems. The only option you have is replication. It's not going to be easy to make FreeNAS highly available (it simply wasn't designed for that).

Thanks for the response, however I think you may have misunderstood what answers I was looking for based on my questions. As I mentioned, I'm aware there isn't any good HA solution for FreeNAS, and that's why I'm looking more for ideas on how to use replication (or other options) as a useful failover technique. I can't be the only one who wants a little better fault tolerance.

 

[bigphil]

If you have identical hardware I don't think it would be too hard to setup. If true, you could swap the drives and load a system config backup onto the cold spare. If dissimilar hardware you may still be able to load the config backup but should test before hand. You can replicate datasets and make them have the exact same path if you don't want to go with the cold spare route. Pre-configure all of the appropriate network and sharing settings so activating the backup server wouldn't take too much time. You could also easily create a powercli script that once the primary NAS failed, you could mount the secondary replica datasets and be ready to go quickly...assuming you pre-configure the appropriate network settings on the ESXi hosts.

 

[Curtipus]

If you have identical hardware I don't think it would be too hard to setup. If true, you could swap the drives and load a system config backup onto the cold spare. If dissimilar hardware you may still be able to load the config backup but should test before hand. You can replicate datasets and make them have the exact same path if you don't want to go with the cold spare route. Pre-configure all of the appropriate network and sharing settings so activating the backup server wouldn't take too much time. You could also easily create a powercli script that once the primary NAS failed, you could mount the secondary replica datasets and be ready to go quickly...assuming you pre-configure the appropriate network settings on the ESXi hosts.

Thanks for the info. I wasn't sure if I could set it up with the exact same names for the datastores. I'll have to give that a try, and if that was the case, like you said, I could make a script that essentially switches the IP address from slave to master. Though I'd have to worry about master coming back online and how to deal with that. It's a step in the right direction at least. Cool!

 

[bigphil]

No, I said datasets, as on FreeNAS. You can't have the same datastore names on ESXi. It's all doable, you just need to work through the steps.

 

[Curtipus]

No, I said datasets, as on FreeNAS. You can't have the same datastore names on ESXi. It's all doable, you just need to work through the steps.

Oh, I knew what you were referring to, I just jumbled datastore/set around all willy nilly. Thanks for the clarification anyway to anyone else reading this.