High Availability Solution for VM on local Storage

Solution 1:

The vSphere Storage Appliance can "share" local storage between different vmware hosts, but I don't think its included in essentials plus. There is vSphere Replication, which is a vmware appliance that could replicate the database VM and its local storage to another host's local storage. Its also included in essentials plus. However, its not going to be automated like vSphere HA (at least I don't think so) and you're not going to get better than a 15min RPO. If that's acceptable, its probably the best choice.

The better solution would be to re-examine the database's IO requirements and look into a SAN that can support its and the rest of your cluster's needs. Most SAN manufacturers offer SSD options. Or, if that's not a possiblity, then maybe moving the DB to dedicated hardware and leveraging the application's HA offerings (Oracle RAC/dataguard, mysql master-master, etc) to meet your needs.

Solution 2:

StarWind has a native Hyper-V implementation. They do sell this since 2011. VMware has the same thing called vSAN being currently in beta. So StarWind had visioned the future long before whole IT industry had moved to the right direction :) Key point here - run inside HYPERVISOR and not inside a guest VM. Cheers! Ichiro