XMS Virtual Appliance

you also get a very nice warning when you deploy XMS OVA.

XtremIO will run even if XMS is offline, obviously you can't manage it in that state. Is VMware VSAN an option ?

Thanks, guys. That's how I understood the best practice recommendation. However, I was questioned about that since apparently VMware (at least at some time in the past) recommended that you put your vCenter server on a VMware cluster which is managed by that vCenter server because, "why wouldn't you want the redundancy and resiliency of a VMware cluster?"

Either way, we ended up with a physical vCenter server that is currently being upgraded/replaced, so I'm going to see how people feel about putting standalone ESXi on it and using it as a utility box for all of these management type utilities and keep them "out of band."

having a dedicated ESXi box, does it buy you anything ?  If you have a big enough local datastore on one if your ESXi servers, would work just as well. Unfortunately no HA features (vMotion/DRS).

That doesn't insulate it from a storage event causing a VMware host or cluster to fail.

It's not that this is recommended again, it's actively not supported.

The problem is that if/when you have an outage (planned or unplanned) you end up in a catch-22 situations - you need to XMS in order to start the array, but you need the array started to boot the XMS.

Officially it's not supported to put the XMS on any XtremIO storage - even a different array than the one it's managing.  This is simply because it's too easy to end up in the same situation as above.  eg, two arrays with the corresponding XMS on the opposite array sounds fine - until you have a full datacenter power outage and lose both of them...

with full DC outage my ESXi will be gone as well ..including VNXs that they are running on

Of course not. But the XMS appliance doesn't manage the motherboard and memory. If there's a problem with the motherboard and memory, your XMS appliance goes down but that doesn't mean the array stops serving data. If your XMS appliance lives on the XtremIO array and the XtremIO array goes down, you've lost the array and the device which would be used to troubleshoot it and try to bring it back online.

jgebhart wrote: That doesn't insulate it from a storage event causing a VMware host or cluster to fail.

running on dedicated host will insulate you from motherboard and memory failure ?

i am not sure what are we are discussing then, put it somewhere other then XtremIO, whether it's on local datastore of an ESX host, your laptop running VMware Workstation/Fusion