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 After the failover, you can verify that the Passive node has the role of the Active node in the
vSphere Web Client.
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.
The operating mode of a vCenter Server Appliance controls the failover capabilities and state replication
in a vCenter HA cluster.
A vCenter HA cluster can operate in one of the following modes.
Table 4‑3. vCenter HA Cluster Modes of Operation
Mode Automatic Failover
Manual
Failover Replication
Enabled Yes Yes Yes This default mode of operation protects
the vCenter Server Appliance from
hardware and software failures by
performing automatic failover.
Maintenance No Yes Yes Used for some maintenance tasks. For
other tasks, you have to disable
vCenter HA.
Disabled No No No If the Passive or Witness nodes are
lost or recovering from a failure, a
vCenter HA configuration can be
disabled. The Active node continues as
a standalone
vCenter Server Appliance.
Note If the cluster is operating in either Maintenance or Disabled mode, an Active node can continue
serving client requests even if the Passive and Witness nodes are lost or unreachable.
Prerequisites
Verify that the vCenter HA cluster is deployed and contains the Active, Passive, and Witness nodes.
Procedure
1 Log in to the Active node vCenter Server Appliance with the vSphere Web Client and click
Configure.
2 Under Settings select vCenter HA and click Edit.
vSphere Availability
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