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
The tasks you should complete before attempting to set up Fault Tolerance for your cluster include the
following:
n
Ensure that your cluster, hosts, and virtual machines meet the requirements outlined in the Fault
Tolerance checklist.
n
Configure networking for each host.
n
Create the vSphere HA cluster, add hosts, and check compliance.
After your cluster and hosts are prepared for Fault Tolerance, you are ready to turn on Fault Tolerance for
your virtual machines. See Turn On Fault Tolerance.
Fault Tolerance Checklist
The following checklist contains cluster, host, and virtual machine requirements that you need to be
aware of before using vSphere Fault Tolerance.
Review this list before setting up Fault Tolerance.
Note The failover of fault tolerant virtual machines is independent of vCenter Server, but you must use
vCenter Server to set up your Fault Tolerance clusters.
Cluster Requirements for Fault Tolerance
You must meet the following cluster requirements before you use Fault Tolerance.
n
Fault Tolerance logging and VMotion networking configured. See Configure Networking for Host
Machines.
n
vSphere HA cluster created and enabled. See Creating a vSphere HA Cluster. vSphere HA must be
enabled before you can power on fault tolerant virtual machines or add a host to a cluster that already
supports fault tolerant virtual machines.
Host Requirements for Fault Tolerance
You must meet the following host requirements before you use Fault Tolerance.
n
Hosts must use supported processors.
n
Hosts must be licensed for Fault Tolerance.
n
Hosts must be certified for Fault Tolerance. See
http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php and select Search by Fault Tolerant
Compatible Sets to determine if your hosts are certified.
n
The configuration for each host must have Hardware Virtualization (HV) enabled in the BIOS.
Note VMware recommends that the hosts you use to support FT VMs have their BIOS power
management settings turned to "Maximum performance" or "OS-managed performance".
To confirm the compatibility of the hosts in the cluster to support Fault Tolerance, you can also run profile
compliance checks as described in Create Cluster and Check Compliance.
vSphere Availability
VMware, Inc. 53