I spent like 20 minutes typing up a question in r/sysadmin, and the moderator thing deleted my post because I don’t have enough karma. I knew there was a reason I never got involved there. Posted here because fuck you thats why.

Let me start by telling you what I want to accomplish. I have a two node system using VMware and vCenter. All of the VMs run on one of the servers, and I’d like to replicate the storage to the second node (in case of failure, can re-launch VMs on the other server).

My question is how can I replicate the data? This is for a friends very small business and they don’t have much budget to speak of, so I am trying to sort out a way of providing them with some modicum of HA without breaking the bank.

My initial thought was to create a Linux guest on the unused server and make a large iSCSI volume, then connect that iSCSI volume to the first server and move the VM storage over. Then I would do basically the same thing on the in-use node; create a Linux server and a large iSCSI volume. I can’t find any mention of targetcli providing replication capacity, but maybe there is another solution?

They have vCenter server and I thought about just clustering the two hosts, but I’m assuming it would just balance the VMs between hosts and if one goes down that would be as good as them both going down (unless there was centralized storage, of course).

StarWind vSAN seems to provide this functionality, but the free version requires a Windows host and I’d rather stay away if possible.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Fuck you, reddit.