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
Using Auto Deploy with vSphere HA
You can use vSphere HA and Auto Deploy together to improve the availability of your virtual machines.
Auto Deploy provisions hosts when they power-on and you can also configure it to install the vSphere HA
agent on hosts during the boot process. See the Auto Deploy documentation included in vSphere
Installation and Setup for details.
Upgrading Hosts in a Cluster Using vSAN
If you are upgrading the ESXi hosts in your vSphere HA cluster to version 5.5 or later, and you also plan
to use vSAN, follow this process.
1 Upgrade all of the hosts.
2 Disable vSphere HA.
3 Enable vSAN.
4 Re-enable vSphere HA.
Best Practices for Cluster Monitoring
Observe the following best practices for monitoring the status and validity of your vSphere HA cluster.
Setting Alarms to Monitor Cluster Changes
When vSphere HA or Fault Tolerance take action to maintain availability, for example, a virtual machine
failover, you can be notified about such changes. Configure alarms in vCenter Server to be triggered
when these actions occur, and have alerts, such as emails, sent to a specified set of administrators.
Several default vSphere HA alarms are available.
n
Insufficient failover resources (a cluster alarm)
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Cannot find master (a cluster alarm)
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Failover in progress (a cluster alarm)
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Host HA status (a host alarm)
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VM monitoring error (a virtual machine alarm)
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VM monitoring action (a virtual machine alarm)
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Failover failed (a virtual machine alarm)
Note The default alarms include the feature name, vSphere HA.
vSphere Availability
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