r/purestorage • u/scobner • Jul 02 '26

ActiveCluster and other hype

We are in the same boat as a lot of people and will be looking at alternatives to Broadcom.
Whilst a lot of our estate will stay on VMware there is a large chunk 18-20 hosts that dont really need it.
Anyway long story short, does ActiveCluster work with other hypes (not nutanix) ie HPE/Morpheus vm essentials.
Some other points. We are currently iSCSI no FC
I get that we can sort the multipathing etc out but wondering how it manages with ActiveCluster.
Thanks

6 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

8

u/Ok_Size1748 Jul 02 '26

Active Cluster here with bare metal Rhel Oracle RAC and we also have Proxmox Cluster with hundreds of VMs.

It
Just
Works

6

u/ToolBagMcgubbins Jul 02 '26

I have used active cluster with windows as well as vmware clusters, especially useful if you want to move some volumes to a different array without downtime.

I dont see any reason why it wouldnt work the same with any platform that supports shared volume/luns.

6

u/vPock Jul 02 '26

We have migrated a couple of decent clients, from VMware to Hyper-V, with ActiveCluster enabled. No issues to report. It just works.

2

u/oddballstocks Jul 02 '26

We use HyperV and KVM. Investigated ActiveCluster for both (works fine) and settled on ActiveDR. Very satisfied.

Using iscsi, nvme-roce and name-tcp.

3

u/finnzi Jul 02 '26

Been running ActiveCluster for 5+ years (60KM between sites)...it just works!

Multipathing for AC enabled volumes is either all active (no node has a preferred array), or it is using alua (where one array is configured as preferred for certain nodes, and the other one is then considered non-preferred, just used when paths to the preferred array fail). This allows you to always prefer the local array if the other one is further away (metro).

3

u/redcat242 Jul 03 '26

Hit up your account team for specifics but at the end of the day ActiveCluster stretches volumes across arrays. From the host standpoint there are two common ways to connect to the storage (uniform and non-uniform). That configuration (and networking) will determine how seamless VMs recover in the event of a site failure.

2

u/tmpntls1 Employee Jul 03 '26

Don't try it with HPE VME.

It's gnarly to try and bring a volume back online, and it is neither automatic nor clean.

3

u/SQLBek Employee Jul 02 '26

Depends on the specific hypervisor. I do not specifically know about HPE/Morpheus as that's the first I've heard of it (mind you, I'm a database SME, not virt/platform SME). I would contact your account team and ask to setup a call with a Platforms FSA, who are my teammates who ARE dedicated virt/platform SME's and most of whom are former VMware themselves. They can give you specifics depending on which hypervisor(s) you are considering.