6.7
Table Of Contents
- vSphere Availability
- Contents
- About vSphere Availability
- Business Continuity and Minimizing Downtime
- Creating and Using vSphere HA Clusters
- Providing Fault Tolerance for Virtual Machines
- How Fault Tolerance Works
- Fault Tolerance Use Cases
- Fault Tolerance Requirements, Limits, and Licensing
- Fault Tolerance Interoperability
- Preparing Your Cluster and Hosts for Fault Tolerance
- Using Fault Tolerance
- Best Practices for Fault Tolerance
- Legacy Fault Tolerance
- Troubleshooting Fault Tolerant Virtual Machines
- Hardware Virtualization Not Enabled
- Compatible Hosts Not Available for Secondary VM
- Secondary VM on Overcommitted Host Degrades Performance of Primary VM
- Increased Network Latency Observed in FT Virtual Machines
- Some Hosts Are Overloaded with FT Virtual Machines
- Losing Access to FT Metadata Datastore
- Turning On vSphere FT for Powered-On VM Fails
- FT Virtual Machines not Placed or Evacuated by vSphere DRS
- Fault Tolerant Virtual Machine Failovers
- vCenter High Availability
- Plan the vCenter HA Deployment
- Configure the Network
- Configure vCenter HA With the Basic Option
- Configure vCenter HA With the Advanced Option
- Manage the vCenter HA Configuration
- Set Up SNMP Traps
- Set Up Your Environment to Use Custom Certificates
- Manage vCenter HA SSH Keys
- Initiate a vCenter HA Failover
- Edit the vCenter HA Cluster Configuration
- Perform Backup and Restore Operations
- Remove a vCenter HA Configuration
- Reboot All vCenter HA Nodes
- Change the Appliance Environment
- Collecting Support Bundles for a vCenter HA Node
- Troubleshoot Your vCenter HA Environment
- Patching a vCenter High Availability Environment
- Using Microsoft Clustering Service for vCenter Server on Windows High Availability
Option Description
Basic The Basic option clones the Active node to the Passive node and witness node, and configures the nodes for you.
If your environment meets one the following requirements, you can use this option.
n
Either the vCenter Server Appliance that becomes the Active node is managing its own ESXi host and its own
virtual machine. This configuration is sometimes called a self-managed vCenter Server.
n
Or the vCenter Server Appliance managed by another vCenter Server (management vCenter Server) and both
vCenter Server instances are in the same vCenter Single Sign-On domain. That means they both use an external
Platform Services Controller and both are running vSphere 6.5.
See Configure vCenter HA With the Basic Option.
Advanced The Advanced option offers more flexibility. You can use this option provided that your environment meets hardware
and software requirements.
If you select this option, you are responsible for cloning the Active node to the Passive node and the Witness node. You
must also perform some networking configuration.
See Configure vCenter HA With the Advanced Option.
Protecting vCenter Server with VMware Service Lifecycle
Manager
Availability of vCenter Server is provided by VMware Service Lifecycle Manager.
If a vCenter service fails, VMware Service Lifecycle Manager restarts it. VMware Service Lifecycle
Manager monitors the health of services and it takes preconfigured remediation action when it detects a
failure. Service does not restart if multiple attempts to remediate fail.
vSphere Availability
VMware, Inc. 10