We currently have 2 ESXi (free) machines.
Each machine has 12TB of local storage
There are 2 luns presented to each ESXi machine from this storage pool (one 10TB, the other 2TB)
We Raw Map the 10TB lun and present it directly to a VM for its storage drive, the other 2TB lun is a standard datastore for this VM's OS drive (which uses around 8GB from this datastore)
The first and second server are both set up this way.(1 VM on each, with their own 10TB RDM lun from their respective machine)
Storage on the first ESXi machine's VM is rsynced to the second machines VM over the network for backup.
We would like to use something like VSA to replicate the 10TB storage drive and the OS over both machines for redundancy. (so that we dont need 2 different VM's and the rsync protocol)
I understand that setting up VSA clusters requires a format of the local storage?, Given that we don't have another copy of the data anywhere (or the budget to copy the data to another device) is is possible to setup the VSA cluster with machine 2, copy the data from machine 1 to 2, then add machine 1 to the cluster afterwards, or is there a minimum of 2 machines required to create the cluster in the first place?
The other issue is presenting the 10TB to a VM again since there is a limit of 2TB at present? and that we then wouldnt be able to RDM the 10TB again since its now "shared storage" ?
Any help on this would be appreciated.
Thanks!