Sharing Directly Attached Storage between UCS C servers for UC deployment

[James Hawkins]

Hi,

I am in the process of designing a new UCS C series deployment for a customer and would like some feedback on ideas around sharing storage to allow the use of some advanced VMware features.

The customer has two UCS C210 M2 servers with directly attached storage and these are being replaced with two UCS C220 M4 servers again with DAS.

I am aware that VMware allow DAS storage to be shared between hosts which allows features such as vMotion, High Availability etc. Cisco now seem to support some of these features so I am wondering if I can set up the new servers to use these features.

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/virtualization-software-requirements.html#vmware_ha

For example, it would be great if I could use the High Availability feature to move the CUCM Publisher to the second UCS server if the first one had an issue and needed to be taken out of service for maintenance.

Has anyone done this or considered it? - any feedback or links to resources for configuring the servers to share storage would be most welcome.

Regards

James

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Hi James-

I'm editing my response after realizing you already had the relevant documentation link. I believe what you're asking about is a vMotion task moreso than an HA/DRS feature. The document covers this as well.

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/virtualization-software-requirements.html#vmotion

CUCM is supported with caveats so you can do it as long as the rules stated aren't violate. I wouldn't do it outside a maintenance window though; the VM is going to be paused temporarily while the in-memory state of the VM is copied over to the new host. A call could be dropped if a timer expires during this for example.