Storage Containers vs. vStores | Nutanix Community
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While learning AHV I’m a bit confused on a few things as it relates to vStores and Remote Sites.

  • What is the purpose of a vStore and how do they differ from Containers?
  • What are the implications of mapping a Site-A’s vStore (Container-A) to Site-B’s vStore (Container-B) that has running VMs in it?
  • What are the implications of not including all VMs from within Site-A’s Container-A in a Protection Domain and failing-over said PD to Site-B?      - Will the unprotected VMs from Container-A continue to run in Site-A?      - What happens when I fail-back the PD to Site-A?
  • Let’s say I’ve mapped Container-A (Site-A) to Container-B (Site-B). If I create a Protection Domain that contains VMs from Container-A2 (Site-A), how does this factor into my vStore mappings between sites?

Thanks for the assist!

Hi @Coleman 

  • What is the purpose of a vStore and how do they differ from Containers? 

vStore

A separate mount point within a storage container which has its own NFS namespace. This namespace maps to a Protection Domain. Each vStore is exported as a device through the Nutanix SRA.

 

storage container

A subset of available storage within a storage pool.

  • What are the implications of mapping a Site-A’s vStore (Container-A) to Site-B’s vStore (Container-B) that has running VMs in it?

By just mapping Site A’s Container A with Site B’s Container B there are no implications.  It just defines the source and destination at the time of replication. So when we start replicating the data between both sites the VM disks located in Container A of Site A will send data to the VM disk located in the Container B of Site B. Those VMs are protected under Protection Domain

 

  • What are the implications of not including all VMs from within Site-A’s Container-A in a Protection Domain and failing-over said PD to Site-B?      - Will the unprotected VMs from Container-A continue to run in Site-A?      - What happens when I fail-back the PD to Site-A?

If the VMs are not protected under the Protection Domain then failover doesn’t happen. Failover or Failback works only for the VMs which are part of the Protection Domain 

  • Let’s say I’ve mapped Container-A (Site-A) to Container-B (Site-B). If I create a Protection Domain that contains VMs from Container-A2 (Site-A), how does this factor into my vStore mappings between sites?

In that case, if you don’t do store mapping of the Container -A2 then by default, it will be mapped to default Container on SIte B ( SelfService Container) But Best practice is to map explicitly  as we did for Container A and Container B.

 

Please refer DR guide for more explanation and failover scenarios

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details/?targetId=Prism-Element-Data-Protection-Guide-v5_17%3APrism-Element-Data-Protection-Guide-v5_17

 

Thanks so much, Neel!

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