VMotion vs VCS

[Rick_Smith1]

We have a  slightly complicated question, it is, however, not really that complicated.

We are moving one of our money generating apps over to dedicated UCS blades, and in VCS, (Linux on UCS blades with VCS), there is, however, some talk of using VMware and  vMotion, and treat this application like other VM's that we have - in the sense, vMotion them in case of failover. This app has Terabytes of data. It is currently running on powerful Solaris systems and will be migrated to Linux on UCS. I sense that VMware is good for small databases and small apps.....

My thinking is that changes should occur at higher levels, thereby insulating lower levels, given this logic,  for instance, a failover should occur at the VCS level, not below the os....things like, if the os gets corrupted, vMotion will move the corrupted data alongwith.

What do you recommend and why?

[mikebounds]

VCS now supports vMotion, so I would install VCS, because as you say, if the O/S, which includes things like the registry keys for your application, gets corrupt, then with VCS you can failover the application to a different O/S.  VCS also gives you more flexibilty - see https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/veritas-global-cluster-solution-vs-esxi-vmware-srm for more details which although started off about a discussion including GCO, most of the discussion does not involve GCO.

Also see https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/sfhadr-vvr-running-physical-and-virtual-server for details on Vmotion with VCS.

Mike