Implementing vSphere Metro Storage Cluster With ActiveCluster: Overview and Introduction
Business critical applications and the virtual machines hosting them often need the highest possible resiliency to ensure that business operations do not stop in the case of a disaster—either localized or site-wide.
To ensure this, the data in use by those applications needs to be spread across two arrays, often in more than one geographic location; importantly, this data need to be available in both sites at the same time. To achieve this, some arrays offer synchronous replication that provide the ability to write to the same block storage volume simultaneously while maintaining write-order. This is traditionally called Active-Active replication.
The Everpure FlashArray introduced Active-Active replication, called ActiveCluster, in the Purity 5.0.0 release.
In VMware vSphere environments, a common use-case for Active-Active replication is with the VMware vSphere High Availability offering. Together, this solution is called VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC). The combination of these features provider the best possible Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for vSphere environments.
This paper overviews configuration and best practices for using the Everpure FlashArray ActiveCluster feature with the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster solution.
For specific best practices for individual features, please refer to Everpure or VMware documentation depending on the circumstance.