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
Advanced Configuration Workflow
If you cannot select the Basic option or you want more control over your deployment, you can perform
Advanced configuration. With this option, you are responsible for cloning the Active node yourself as part
of vCenter HA setup. If you select this option and remove the vCenter HA configuration later, you are
responsible for deleting the nodes that you created.
For the Advanced option, the workflow is as follows.
1 The user deploys the first vCenter Server Appliance, which will become the Active node.
2 The user adds a second network (port group) for vCenter HA traffic on each ESXi host.
3 The user adds a second network adapter (NIC) to the Active node
4 The user logs in to the vCenter Server Appliance (Active node) with the vSphere Web Client.
5 The user starts the vCenter HA configuration, selects Advanced, and supplies IP address and subnet
information for the Passive and Witness nodes. Optionally, the user can override the failover
management IP addresses.
6 The user logs in to the management vCenter Server and creates two clones of the
vCenter Server Appliance (Active node).
7 The user returns to the configuration wizard on the vCenter Server Appliance and completes the
configuration process.
8 The system sets up the vCenter HA network on which the three nodes exchange heartbeats and
replication information.
9 The vCenter Server Appliance is protected by vCenter HA.
See Configure vCenter HA With the Advanced Option for details.
Configure the Network
Regardless of the deployment option and inventory hierarchy that you select, you have to set up your
network before you can start configuration. To set the foundation for the vCenter HA network, you add a
port group to each ESXi host, and add a virtual NIC to the vCenter Server Appliance that later becomes
the Active node.
After configuration is complete, the vCenter HA cluster has two networks, the management network on
the first virtual NIC and the vCenter HA network on the second virtual NIC.
Management network The management network serves client requests (public IP). The
management network IP addresses must be static.
vCenter HA network The vCenter HA network connects the Active, Passive, and Witness nodes
and replicates the appliance state. It also monitors heartbeats.
n
The vCenter HA network IP addresses for the Active, Passive, and
Witness nodes must be static.
vSphere Availability
VMware, Inc. 75