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
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Set Up Your Environment to Use Custom Certificates
The machine SSL certificate on each node is used for cluster management communication and for
encryption of replication traffic. If you want to use custom certificates, you have to remove the
vCenter HA configuration, delete the Passive and Witness nodes, provision the Active node with the
custom certificate, and reconfigure the cluster.
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Manage vCenter HA SSH Keys
vCenter HA uses SSH keys for password-less authentication between the Active, Passive, and
Witness nodes. The authentication is used for heartbeat exchange and file and data replication. To
replace the SSH keys in the nodes of a vCenter HA cluster, you disable the cluster, generate new
SSH keys on the Active node, transfer the keys to the passive node, and enable the cluster.
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Initiate a vCenter HA Failover
You can manually initiate a failover and have the Passive node become the Active node.
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Edit the vCenter HA Cluster Configuration
When you edit the vCenter HA cluster configuration, you can disable or enable the cluster, place the
cluster in maintenance mode, or remove the cluster.
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Perform Backup and Restore Operations
For additional security, you can back up the Active node in the vCenter HA cluster. You can then
restore the node in case of catastrophic failure.
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Remove a vCenter HA Configuration
You can remove a vCenter HA configuration from the vSphere Web Client. If you are using an
Advanced configuration, or if any of the nodes are not discoverable, you might have to perform
additional cleanup steps.
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Reboot All vCenter HA Nodes
If you have to shut down and reboot all nodes in the cluster, you must follow a specific shutdown
order to prevent the Passive node from assuming the role of Active node.
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Change the Appliance Environment
When you deploy a vCenter Server Appliance, you select an environment. For vCenter HA, Small,
Medium, Large, and X-Large are supported for production environments. If you need more space
and want to change the environment, you have to delete the Passive node virtual machine before
you change the configuration.
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Collecting Support Bundles for a vCenter HA Node
Collecting a support bundle from all the nodes in a vCenter HA cluster helps with troubleshooting.
Set Up SNMP Traps
You can set up Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps to receive SNMP notifications for
your vCenter HA cluster.
The traps default to SNMP version 1.
vSphere Availability
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