IPO Server Edition 9.1 Select and VMWare High Availability 2

Yes they are , have this set up in the lab.

APSS (SME)
ACSS (SME)
ACIS (UC)

Great news. It would be great if I could get to talk to you for 5 minutes.

montyzummer,

Can you tell me something about your VMWare installation? What is needed to have this running?
I'm not a VMware expert. I know ESXi is free, but there are a lot of other licenses, you can buy a house instead...
Given you have two hosts like HP DL360, both with ESXi: where is the storage? Internal and synchronized? Or on a NAS/SAN and duplicated?
Typically, the two hosts are in different location.
Many thank!

What I don't really understand is why/how vmware HA is tied to select edition. HA is independent of the guest OS - you should be able to implement HA on any guest OS at all.

So why is it restricted to Select edition?

New England Communications

Be aware that VMWare HA doesn't help in the case the primary server will not start anymore. From.my part of view vMotion is enough to let the primary server do it's work even if one ESXi will become unavailable.

Hey guys, sorry for igniting an old thread but this discussion must go on. I can bring some clarification to the VMware side of things if someone is willing to assist in IPO questions - seems like the right forum

VMware High Availability DOES NOT work with the free ESXI hypervisor. You MUST purchase something like the VMware Essentials Plus pack because you will need a vCenter server, 2 hosts, and in most cases a SAN appliance. If you don't have a SAN, you would likely have to purchase something like VMware's virtual SAN and have that deployed. Overall, only implmenting high availability for telephony is a VERY expensive deployment, best served if your call center has big $$$ or already has invested in PAID versions of VMware that support HA. ESXi free is great for a simple virtualization option, but all of the "glamorous" features VMware offers are only on their paid versions. SAN deployments are also easily upwards of $25,000 for an entry level SAN.

How this generally works is - Customer has 2+ physical servers and all of their storage is on the SAN. All of the VM's are licensed and configured with VMware and the CPU/RAM functions are done by the server. The vCenter server will look for the active server to die, and if a server does die - it directs one of the other servers to start up and start processing memory & cpu functionality while the VM and all of the data is still stored on the SAN. Storage must be (unless using virtual san licensing) kept on an external device so that vMotion and HA can function regardless of what hosts (servers) are online.

NOW - my question is exactly the same as JayNEC's. How does Avaya limit this from not working on standard Server Edition? Is this purposely broken in some way to sell the more expensive SES license? Has anyone tried using HA on standard server edition with R9? Did it work on that release and they only broke it on R9.1 to sell SES? Does it actually work on R9.1 but just is not supported by Avaya? Anyone who can shed some insight on that would be greatly appreciated.

I'm failing to see how they gimped the feature as well. With the way vmotion and HA works a system should never know when it has been moved from one hardware to another via vmotion or a hard power loss event. I know that there are events that can trigger licenses to lock because the SID changes on the Server Edition but I don't see how Avaya could detect that during a vmotion.

Keep in mind: "It's supported" means it's official and at least in a lab it was tested and in case of someone reports a problem, there is some test material available.
"It's not supported" does not always mean it won't work. It's just not supported (by Avaya support).

In addition to what jhengel has written, if you have not just two servers on two host with one storage, but the second set is in a different datacenter to become survivability if a datacenter is lost, this means two storages mirrored. -> $$$

Avanti - to make the situation a bit more confusing, vMotion IS supported on R9 with Standard Server Edition. This means that the hardware ID is NOT changing during a vMotion event.

Now, I have a load of certs but VCP5-DCV is not yet one of them...but my understanding from VMware labs is that the process between vMotion and HA are very similar. One would think that if vMotion didn't change the hardware ID that HA would not either.

I am also wondering if HA would work fine on a standard SE, but going down the "unsupported" road has it's own caveats.