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
vCenter HA with an External Platform Services Controller
When you use vCenter HA with an external Platform Services Controller, you must set up an external
load balancer to protect the Platform Services Controller. If one Platform Services Controller becomes
unavailable, the load balancer directs the vCenter Server Appliance to a different
Platform Services Controller.
Set up of the external Platform Services Controller is discussed in the following VMware Knowledge Base
articles.
n
2147014: Configuring Netscaler Load Balancer for use with vSphere Platform Services Controller
(PSC) 6.5
n
2147038 Configuring F5 BIG-IP Load Balancer for use with vSphere Platform Services Controller
(PSC) 6.5
n
2147046 Configuring NSX Edge Load Balancer for use with vSphere Platform Services Controller
(PSC) 6.5
The environment setup is as follows.
Figure 4‑3. vCenter HA with External Platform Services Controller
Platform Services
Controller
Load Balancer
vCenter (Active)
HA Interface
vCenter (Passive)
Witness
vCenter HA
Network
HA Interface
Mgmt Interface
Platform Services
Controller
1 The user sets up at least two external Platform Services Controller instances. These instances
replicate vCenter Single Sign-On information and other Platform Services Controller information, for
example, licensing.
2 During provisioning of the vCenter Server Appliance, the user selects an external
Platform Services Controller.
3 The user sets up the vCenter Server Appliance to point to a load balancer that provides high
availability for Platform Services Controller.
4 The user or the Basic configuration clones the first vCenter Server Appliance to create the Passive
node and Witness node.
vSphere Availability
VMware, Inc. 73