The demand for across site VMotion and High Availability/Business continuity has shown an increase in the past year or so. I have started to see more customers implementing/considering such solution. I remember when VMware added support for vSphere stretched clusters about a year back, where only EMC VPLEX was on the Hardware Compatibility list. Actually EMC has done a massive amount of work with VMware to verify the solution and make sure it pickup. Guess what, it did not take long for other storage vendors to see how quickly vSphere Stretched Cluster is picking up & now both NetApp & IBM have a configuration that is supported in a stretched cluster configuration.

In this post I will be discussing many of the best practices that you want to follow when building a vSphere Stretched Cluster. While many of these recommendation are generic and apply to most vSphere 5.1 Stretched Clusters, I have only validated them in an EMC VPLEX environment. Please make sure you check with your storage vendor before applying those recommendations to a different environment.

Before starting to implement a vSphere Stretched Cluster, you would want to understand how it work and what enable it. What you are trying to achieve in here is to enable VMware HA & VMware VMotion to work across sites.… Read More