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
If either the host running the Primary VM or the host running the Secondary VM fails, an immediate and
transparent failover occurs. The functioning ESXi host seamlessly becomes the Primary VM host without
losing network connections or in-progress transactions. With transparent failover, there is no data loss
and network connections are maintained. After a transparent failover occurs, a new Secondary VM is
respawned and redundancy is re-established. The entire process is transparent and fully automated and
occurs even if vCenter Server is unavailable.
Protecting the vCenter Server Appliance with vCenter
High Availability
vCenter High Availability (vCenter HA) protects not only against host and hardware failures but also
against vCenter Server application failures. Using automated failover from active to passive, vCenter HA
supports high availability with minimal downtime.
vCenter HA Deployment Options
vCenter HA protects your vCenter Server Appliance. However, Platform Services Controller provides
authentication, certificate management, and licenses for the vCenter Server Appliance. As a result, you
have to guarantee high availability of Platform Services Controller. You have these options.
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Deploy an Active node with an embedded Platform Services Controller. As part of the cloning
process, the Platform Services Controller and all is services are cloned as well. As part of
synchronization from Active node to Passive node, Platform Services Controller on the Passive node
is updated.
When failover from the Active node to the Passive node occurs, the Platform Services Controller on
the passive node are available and the complete environment is available.
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Deploy at least two Platform Services Controller instances and place them behind a load balancer.
When failover from the Active node to the Passive node occurs, the Passive node continues to point
to the load balancer. When one of the Platform Services Controller instances becomes unavailable,
the load balancer directs requests to the second Platform Services Controller instance.
See vCenter HA Deployment Options.
vCenter HA Configuration Options
You configure vCenter HA from the vSphere Client. The configuration wizard provides these options.
vSphere Availability
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