Any cheap options for 2 drive mirroring compatible with ESXi

[paulpthcom]

I'm working on setting up my new NAS/All in One ESXi box and want to get the ESXi datastore mirrored.

Current setup is X9SCM-F + IBM M1015 in IT mode passthrough-ed to one of the VMs.

I had ASSumed that I could just mirror the datastore using the built in intel RAID mode, but since that's not supported I wonder if there's any other cheap options?

The cheapest solution I can find is just to get another IBM M1015 stick it in IR mode and use it to connect up the 2 drives. Seems wasteful for just 2 drives so just checking to see if someone has a different option.

 

[Mike]

The cheapest is to do nightly backups with something like ghettovcb to a secondary disks.

 

[paulpthcom]

The cheapest is to do nightly backups with something like ghettovcb to a secondary disks.

Thanks for the reply. The problem with something like ghettovcb (other than it not being supported anymore) is that it doesn't seem to be able to backup a running VM that uses a passthrough device. At least I sure can't figure out how that'd work.

I'll backup the passthrough enabled VM within the VM, but restoring that would be a pain, much rather have backups and RAID.

 

[Mike]

Pretty much all backup methods use snapshots to copy the image from beginning to end without having changes written during the process which would cause corruptions. Maybe a Linux VM is best backed up when installed on an LVM volume, you can snapshot within the VM then.