At my customer we recently installed App Volumes 2.14 in a in a multi-site deployment. Because the vSAN storages on both sites can’t directly communicate with each other, we need to set up storage replication to synchronize the AppStacks. In this blog I will cover how to configure Storage Groups in the App Volumes Manager.
To setup storage replication between the two sites, a ‘non-attached’ datastore need to be created to act as a man in the middle. A ‘non-attached’ datastore means that it’s a place where AppStacks can be located, but those AppStacks will never be attached to a desktop. In this case I used NFS for the ‘non-attachable’ datastore, but VMFS is also possible.
Before we can create the Storage Groups, we first need to mark the NFS datastore as ‘non-attached’. To do this, complete to following steps:
- Logon to the App Volumes Manager.
- Select the tab Infrastructure and click on the sub tab Storage.
- Select the NFS datastore and click Make as not attachable.
Now the NFS datastore is marked as ‘non-attached’, Complete the following steps to configure the Storage Groups.
- Select the tab Storage Groups and click on the button Create Storage Group.
- Name the Storage Group.
- Check both options to automatically import and replicate the AppStacks.
- Check the NFS datastore and one of the two vSAN datastores.
- Click Create.
- Repeat the steps above to create a second Storage Group for the other vSAN datastore.
- Now you have 2 storage groups one for each site and the ‘non-attached’ storage, NFS datastore, is included in each Storage Group.
Once you created both Storage Groups, the NFS datastore will be used by both vSAN datastores to synchronize and replicate the AppStacks.
