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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
Business Continuity and
Minimizing Downtime 1
Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, brings considerable costs. However, solutions that ensure
higher levels of availability have traditionally been costly, hard to implement, and difficult to manage.
VMware software makes it simpler and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important
applications. With vSphere, you can increase the baseline level of availability provided for all applications
and provide higher levels of availability more easily and cost effectively. With vSphere, you can:
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Provide high availability independent of hardware, operating system, and applications.
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Reduce the planned downtime for common maintenance operations.
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Provide automatic recovery in cases of failure.
vSphere makes it possible to reduce planned downtime, prevent unplanned downtime, and recover
rapidly from outages.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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Reducing Planned Downtime
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Preventing Unplanned Downtime
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vSphere HA Provides Rapid Recovery from Outages
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vSphere Fault Tolerance Provides Continuous Availability
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Protecting the vCenter Server Appliance with vCenter High Availability
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Protecting vCenter Server with VMware Service Lifecycle Manager
Reducing Planned Downtime
Planned downtime typically accounts for over 80% of data center downtime. Hardware maintenance,
server migration, and firmware updates all require downtime for physical servers. To minimize the impact
of this downtime, organizations are forced to delay maintenance until inconvenient and difficult-to-
schedule downtime windows.
VMware, Inc.
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