Hi Ian,

Thanks for the reply and Yes, I think you've understood me correctly :-)

You have more or less confirmed what I had anticipated. Is there any way that I could do this by running SAN Melody on a VM and using this to present the storage? Obviously it would need to be on local storage (not the shared storage that it was supposed to be presenting). For instance - if I had a 2-host ESX cluster, would it be possible to run a SAN Melody VM on each and provide multipathing this way, with the SAN Melody VM on the 'other' ESX host being the path a given ESX host would fail over to if there was a problem somewhere along the original path. If the original ESX died, VMware HA would kick in and the new path would still be visible in that case also ... does this sound feasible? There is some info on running SAN Melody in a VM at http://www.datacore.com/VMstoragefoundation/ so it is do-able at some level...

One other point to make is that I am not interested in synchronous / HA / intra-site type replication, just in AIM over a WAN.

Thanks,
virtuallyhere.

IanGoodwin Wrote:Hi virtually here

If I've understood your description correctly, what you're proposing wouldn't work. You're right - SANmelody wouldn't know there had been a write.

What you could do (and is a very common set-up) is to put SANmelody between IBM storage and your ESX nodes.

This will boost performance and allow you to successfully use remote replication. Of course this means you'll need hardware on which to put SANmelody.

All the best, Ian

Hi,

Something similar has been discussed previously at

http://www.datacore.com/forum/threadView.aspx?id=312&ps=312&hl=

but I'd like to get a definitive answer for my specific scenario. I have iSCSI storage (IBM DS3300) that's being connected to a VMware ESX cluster via standard Gig-Ethernet network ... so presentation is not being done by Datacore (SAN Melody). I do, however, want to use SAN Melody running on a Virtual Machine solely for asynchronous replication (i.e. AIM) over a WAN. Can this be done? I see a number of problems e.g. how does SAN melody know if there has been a write if I'm using VMFS? In which case, should I use RDM? I'm not a very experienced Datacore user so there may be other problems that I don't even see but in general terms, is this possible and what approach should I use? I would like to avoid using a separate physical box for storage presentation if possible.

Thanks,
virtuallyhere.