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Use Case Study: Using Active System For VMware Cluster Environment Configuration

highlighted, click the link to go to “Properties”. Click the “Manage Paths” button to go to the multi-

pathing settings for this shared volume.

By default the volume will be set to a “Fixed” multi-pathing configuration. For the purposes of this

example, change this to a “Round Robin” configuration. This will allow both paths to the storage to be

active and fully utilize the throughput of both ports. In addition, if one of the paths to the storage goes

down, there is still a second path available so connectivity to storage will not be lost. Once Round

Robin has been selected, click the button to “Change” the configuration. Once the change is

complete, you should see both paths to the storage volume shown in the “Active” state.

The necessary settings should be changed for the second volume on the host.

Configure Remaining vMotion and Virtual Machine Networks

Similar to the steps followed to create a vSphere switch for the iSCSI network, three additional vSphere

switches will be created for the vMotion and Virtual Machine Networks. As noted earlier the vMotion

network will be VLAN 22 and the Virtual Machine Networks will be VLAN 20 and 23.

For the vMotion switch, ensure that when it is created, the connection type is selected to be

“vmkernel”. Select the appropriate adapters (such as vmnicX) in ESXi that align with the Virtual NICs

which were created in Active System Manager. Each of the three VSphere switches will be assigned two

adapters aligning with the redundant adapters created in Active System Manager. For the vMotion

switch this example uses the name “vMotion” and assigns VLAN 22 to the switch that aligns with the

Virtual NICs created in Active System Manager. Select the options to enable this port group for both

vMotion traffic and fault tolerance logging. Next, provide an IP address for this switch. In this case an

IP address was selected which was accessible from the Hypervisor Management VLAN. The IP used used

in this example had the first two octets of 172.22.x.x and the netmask of 255.255.0.0. Complete the

wizard to finish creating the switch.

Finally create two vSphere switches for the virtual machine traffic. The first vSphere switch will be for

VLAN 20 and the second for VLAN 23. The exact same process will be followed for creating this vSphere

switch, except that a Virtual Machine Network will be selected as the connection type. VLAN 20 was

configured as the Native VLAN in Active System Manager, which means it is expected to have untagged

traffic from the host, therefore a VLAN ID is not configured on this vSphere switch. Since VLAN 23 is not

a native VLAN, you must configure its ID (VLAN ID 23) in the vSphere switch.

At this point the host should have 5 vSphere switches configured for the various purposes outlined

here.

Using A Host Profile

When using a VMware Cluster, all hosts should be configured in an identical manner. This means all

networking, processor, storage, and so on should be the same. This can be a challenge to correctly

implement manually. VMware provides the Host Profile tool to make this configuration easier. Once

you have set up a single host with networking, storage, and any other configuration, you can use this

host to create a Host Profile. This Host Profile can then be used to configure any additional host which

you bring into the cluster

To create a host profile, right click on the host from which you wish to capture the configuration. Then

select the menu item “Host Profile -> Create Profile From Host” to capture the settings. Finally,

provide a name and a description for the profile.