I have a couple different questions about the new virtual setup here at our company. I have three host servers, a Dell PE R510 and two brand new PE R620's. I have an EMC VNXe3150 on the way. I obviously want the SAN to be direct attached storage for all the host servers. The question I'm mainly facing at this point is deciding whether or not the servers are going to remain stand alone boxes or should I cluster them together. By going to a virtual inviroment obviously downtime is a key issue. I like the idea of the keeping the servers individual because I want to the use the R510 as the host for our terminal servers. Its going to be a rather small enviroment with right around ten VM's, three of those being Terminal Servers.
From a stand alone aspect, If I have all the VM's stored on the SAN, and I have hardware issues/failure on one of the host servers, what is going to be required to get that VM up and running on one of the other host servers until I can get the problem fixed? Obviously the least amount of downtime is key here. I've read up on VMotion but from what I can tell is that it requires clustering to function.
Even though I have some experience working with VMWare on individual host with internal storage, going to a centralized SAN storage solution for VMWare is new to me.
Thanks