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
4 Click the Add Networking icon.
5 Provide appropriate information for your connection type.
6 Click Finish.
After you create both a vMotion and Fault Tolerance logging virtual switch, you can create other virtual
switches, as needed. Add the host to the cluster and complete any steps needed to turn on Fault
Tolerance.
What to do next
Note If you configure networking to support FT but subsequently suspend the Fault Tolerance logging
port, pairs of fault tolerant virtual machines that are powered on remain powered on. If a failover situation
occurs, when the Primary VM is replaced by its Secondary VM a new Secondary VM is not started,
causing the new Primary VM to run in a Not Protected state.
Create Cluster and Check Compliance
vSphere Fault Tolerance is used in the context of a vSphere HA cluster. After you configure networking on
each host, create the vSphere HA cluster and add the hosts to it. You can check to see whether the
cluster is configured correctly and complies with the requirements for the enablement of Fault Tolerance.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, browse to the cluster.
2 Click the Monitor tab and click Profile Compliance.
3 Click Check Compliance Now to run the compliance tests.
The results of the compliance test appear, and the compliance or noncompliance of each host is shown.
Using Fault Tolerance
After you have taken all of the required steps for enabling vSphere Fault Tolerance for your cluster, you
can use the feature by turning it on for individual virtual machines.
Before Fault Tolerance can be turned on, validation checks are performed on a virtual machine.
After these checks are passed and you turn on vSphere Fault Tolerance for a virtual machine, new
options are added to the Fault Tolerance section of its context menu. These include turning off or
disabling Fault Tolerance, migrating the Secondary VM, testing failover, and testing restart of the
Secondary VM.
Validation Checks for Turning On Fault Tolerance
If the option to turn on Fault Tolerance is available, this task still must be validated and can fail if certain
requirements are not met.
vSphere Availability
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