2 Servers, 2 Volumegroups, Failover - what's the best setup?

Hello!

We are going virtual in the next weeks/months/... at our location.

I have built 2 Servers (HP DL160G6 with P412, HP D2700 SAS-shelfs). To meet all the requirements of Oracle, our ERP and Windows the external disks are grouped in 2 RAID-sets (0+1 and 5+hotspare). Both servers have six gbe-NICs.

Storage will be mostly presented as iSCSI, some as NFS and userspace as CIFS.
We do need HA. We will use VMWare 5 and the switches are capable of vlan, trunking and LACP.

So what is the best way, to get most of the Hardware? How many NICs should be tied together?

Is it possible to set up one server as the master for one set of targets and the other one for an other?

Falk D.

Right now Open-E only supports Active Passive HA. So if you want to get the most out of your hardware, you will have a hard decision to make about HA. Do you just use replication between the nodes and have data protection? This way you'll get 100% performance but at the cost of no automated failover.
If you go with full blown HA then your other node is there for protection only. You can configure independent targets but those would be unprotected.