How to Configure Xen to run off backup iSCSI storage?

[Bob Herzan]

We would need more information to be able to help you out on this. If you contact us we certainly can try to walk you through your options.

You can contact me directly at bherzan@rorke.com and will try to give you a hand.

Bob Herzan
Vice President of Sales
Rorke Data Inc
952-829-0300

[Edwards Willeam]

Hi,

This could in theory work, however you’ll most likely need to perform
a few manual steps in configuring the storage repository. At a bare
minimum, you’ll need to ensure that:

1. Both XenServers operate on the same subnet or are at least routable
to eachother.
2. The XenServers need to be placed in a pool and must have
communication with eachother.
3. Ideally the LUNs presented by the iSCSI storage have the same IDs –
if not, you’ll need to manually create the PBDs (see
https://docs.xensource.com/XenServer/5.0.0/1.0/en_gb/reference.html#cl…)
to reflect the DR SAN’s LUN configuration.

If this is all too much, there is an alternative which may be of
interest. This method does not require the XenServer hosts to be in a
pool, but you’ll need to be sure not to start up VMs up from the DR
SAN – you will need to investigate what would happen if your DR SAN
had writes to it from the DR XenServer host. This solution would work
as follows:

1. Configure two discrete XenServer hosts (not in a pool) – one for
primary usage, the other for DR.
2. Through the XSConsole (run xsconsole if you wish to use this from
the XenCenter console or SSH), select “Backup, Restore and Update” and
then schedule regular metadata backups.

To restore, you would simply create a new SR on your DR XenServer host
and perform a metadata restore (same procedure as step 2 above, just
choose “restore”).

Thanks..

Edwards