I have the following setup:
- 2x Dell R530 Servers (2 CPUs each) each with their own local storage and a 10 Gbit NIC, ESXi 6.5 installed on each
- 1x vCenter Server VM on one of the two servers
- 1x 10 Gbit Switch
- 1x vCenter Server 6 Standard License
- 4x CPU seats for vSphere w/ Operations Management 6 Enterprise Plus
I do not have a SAN, and cannot afford to get more vSphere licenses or more hardware.
What I need is protection against host failure. If a host goes down, I want to either minimize or eliminate downtime for the VMs.
From my understanding, I can't do vSAN, even with 2-node+witness because I would need a third ESXi server to install the Witness appliance on. I can't do fault tolerance, because my understanding is Fault Tolerance needs shared storage to work. I'm looking at vSphere Replication, but all the documentation talks about replicating between sites, and all of the above setup is at one site. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the term 'site'.
Do I have any options at all to protect my VMs against host failure?