Metro Cluster High Availability or SRM Disaster Recovery?

Several years I continuously try to explain my customers that metro cluster is not disaster recovery. I have finally found some time and summarize my thoughts into slide deck which I published on SlideShare. I'm planning to present it at Czech VMUG local meeting on 6 December this year. More info about this particular Czech VMUG event is here.

The goal of my presentation is to explain the difference between multi site high availability (aka metro cluster) and disaster recovery. General concepts are same for any products but presentation is obviously more tailored for specific VMware products and technologies.

You can look at presentation here on SlideShare ...

Metro Cluster High Availability or SRM Disaster Recovery? from David Pasek

It would be great to see you at the event if you will be in the town. But in the meantime don't hesitate to write any comment or feedback here and we can have good discussion as there are still two months till the event.

BTW: Kudos to Stanislav Jurena @stan_jurena who already did several reviews and gave me some comments and feedback before first public release.  

Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) support on VMware vSphere

Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) is Microsoft cluster technology required shared storage supporting SCSI reservation mechanism. Microsoft has introduced new - perhaps more modern and more descriptive - name for the same technology. New name is "Microsoft Failover Cluster" so don't be confused with different names.

VMware has supplementary documentation called "Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service" covering the subject. Here is online documentation for vSphere 5.5 and here for vSphere 5.1. This documentation is a must to read to fully understand what is and what is not possible.

However documentation is relatively old so if you want to know up-to-date information you have to leverage VMware KB. Here are two KB articles related to the topic

• Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) support on ESXi/ESX (1004617)
• Microsoft Clustering on VMware vSphere: Guidelines for supported configurations (1037959)

And here is general advice.
Plan, plan, plan ... design ... review ... implement ... verify.
I hope you know what I mean.