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
A vSphere HA-enabled cluster is a prerequisite for vSphere Fault Tolerance.
Prerequisites
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Verify that all virtual machines and their configuration files reside on shared storage.
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Verify that the hosts are configured to access the shared storage so that you can power on the virtual
machines by using different hosts in the cluster.
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Verify that hosts are configured to have access to the virtual machine network.
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Verify that you are using redundant management network connections for vSphere HA. For
information about setting up network redundancy, see Best Practices for Networking.
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Verify that you have configured hosts with at least two datastores to provide redundancy for vSphere
HA datastore heartbeating.
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Connect vSphere Web Client to vCenter Server by using an account with cluster administrator
permissions.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, browse to the data center where you want the cluster to reside and click
New Cluster.
2 Complete the New Cluster wizard.
Do not turn on vSphere HA (or DRS).
3 Click OK to close the wizard and create an empty cluster.
4 Based on your plan for the resources and networking architecture of the cluster, use the
vSphere Web Client to add hosts to the cluster.
5 Browse to the cluster and enable vSphere HA.
a Click the Configure tab.
b Select vSphere Availability and click Edit.
c Select Turn ON vSphere HA.
d Select Turn ON Proactive HA to allow proactive migrations of VMs from hosts on which a
provider has notified a health degradation.
6 Under Failures and Responses select Enable Host Monitoring
With Host Monitoring enabled, hosts in the cluster can exchange network heartbeats and vSphere HA
can take action when it detects failures. Host Monitoring is required for the vSphere Fault Tolerance
recovery process to work properly.
7 Select a setting for VM Monitoring.
Select VM Monitoring Only to restart individual virtual machines if their heartbeats are not received
within a set time. You can also select VM and Application Monitoring to enable application
monitoring.
vSphere Availability
VMware, Inc. 33