VMware alternatives for Metro Clustering?
We use shared storage across sites with synchronous replication at the SAN level, with hosts at either end sharing a single cluster. We can live migrate VMs and active storage volumes on the fly in this configuration. We have been reviewing VMware…
We use shared storage across sites with synchronous replication at the SAN level, with hosts at either end sharing a single cluster. We can live migrate VMs and active storage volumes on the fly in this configuration. We have been reviewing VMware alternatives for reasons obvious, however whilst there is far more choice out there on the market these days in terms of a standalone single-site cluster/hypervisor scenario, we haven't really found many options for keeping a metro cluster configuration other than Hyper-V or possibly Nutanix (though we want to keep our SAN and avoid HCI if we can.). So, for anyone also running a metro cluster configuration, what did you switch to (or not) and what would you recommend? Looking like realistically Hyper-V might be the only option for us unless we want to reconsider our configuration.
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Well, Hyper-V is the obvious answer for stretched clusters on shared storage, especially bc you want to keep the SAN & live migrate across sites. Nutanix aHV is the other real-contender, but it usually drags you closer to HCI / platform change
i was at a nutanix convention as they announced they now support SAN of any vendor
They have, admittedly they also sell SAN products so they want to get them fully supported. How well the feature has been beta tested is a question. I'm not a fan of the cloud fleet management solution, but their on-prem variant is coming later this year. Still a bit worried about HPE being HPE and screwing it up though.
source for that?
If you're trying to keep SAN-backed stretched clustering, I'd stop comparing feature matrices and start comparing failure behavior. A lot of platforms look close enough on paper until you drop the inter-site link, lose the witness, or have storage replication lag just enough to get weird. The stuff that matters is quorum/witness design, what it does during split-brain risk, how ugly the recovery is after an unclean failover, and whether your ops team can actually rehearse it without vendor PS standing there. We've seen plenty of "supported" designs that were fine for planned moves and pretty awful for asymmetric failures. If you can, force every candidate through those runbooks before you care about live migration parity.
Proxmox If you can achieve the minimum latency, otherwise use it without a cluster + EVPN + VXLAN
I have not dug in to the details on it yet but I know HPE VM Essentials just added official support for stretch clustering in the 9.0.0 release. I believe an external witness is required to handle quorum and prevent split brain.
XCP-NG + XenOrchestra fits this bill. Using two separate clusters in two cities 300 miles apart across a MPLS link (w/ failover to a wiregaurd tunnel) with identical SANs at each site and utilizing continuous replication. Support is fantastic and will hear you out.
Hyper V is unfortunately the only real competition in that space. I’m sure some of the other hyper visors will get there eventually but not in time for another Broadcomming.
We live migrate with QEMU/KVM, but it's well known that "Stretched Layer-2" can lead to problems. Two solutions are to not migrate across the metro, or to migrate at Layer-3 with routing.
OVE/OKE with PortWorx CSI is an option. You can even do migrations from on-prem to ROSA/ARO/etc, basically any OpenShift running on a supported cloud provider.
If you want to keep the stretched SAN and live-migrate across sites, Hyper-V Failover Clustering is probably the closest like-for-like answer. Most of the other VMware exits get awkward here because they either want HCI or they do HA across sites but not the same active/active metro-cluster behavior. I’d lab the ugly parts first: quorum/witness, storage path failure, site isolation, and what happens when live migration succeeds but storage latency spikes.
Have you looked at whether your SAN vendor has a specific recommendation - some (Pure, NetApp) have validated stretched cluster configs with Hyper-V that take most of the guesswork out?
Huawei DCS should be able to do this
Nutanix has started to allow for certain external storage configurations btw: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/guide-to-migrating-to-nutanix-with-external-storage#
I moved a proxmox cluster 100 miles to another local datacenter it's was not perfect the migration but it worked.