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
3 Select one of the options.
Option Result
Enable vCenter HA Enables replication between the Active and Passive nodes. If the cluster is in a healthy state,
your Active node is protected by automatic failover from the Passive node.
Maintenance Mode In maintenance mode, replication still occurs between the Active and Passive nodes. However,
automatic failover is disabled.
Disable vCenter HA Disables replication and failover. Keeps the configuration of the cluster. You can later enable
vCenter HA again.
Remove vCenter HA
cluster
Removes the cluster. Replication and failover no longer are provided. The Active node continues
to operate as a standalone vCenter Server Appliance. See Remove a vCenter HA Configuration
for details.
4 Click OK.
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.
Note Remove the cluster configuration before you restore the Active node. Results are unpredictable if
you restore the Active node and the Passive node is still running or other cluster configuration is still in
place.
Prerequisites
Verify the interoperability of vCenter HA and the backup and restore solution. One solution is
vCenter Server Appliance file-based restore.
Procedure
1 Back up the Active node.
Do not back up the Passive node and Witness node.
2 Before you restore the cluster, power off and delete all vCenter HA nodes.
3 Restore the Active node.
The Active node is restored as a standalone vCenter Server Appliance.
4 Reconfigure the vCenter HA.
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.
vSphere Availability
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