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
Using Microsoft Clustering
Service for vCenter Server on
Windows High Availability 5
When you deploy vCenter Server, you must build a highly available architecture that can handle
workloads of all sizes.
Availability is critical for solutions that require continuous connectivity to vCenter Server. To avoid
extended periods of downtime, you can achieve continuous connectivity for vCenter Server by using a
Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) cluster.
This chapter includes the following topics:
n
Benefits and Limitations of Using MSCS
n
Upgrade vCenter Server in an MSCS Environment
n
Configure MSCS for High Availability
Benefits and Limitations of Using MSCS
vCenter Server 5.5 update 3.x supports Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) as an option for providing
vCenter Server availability.
Multiple instances of vCenter Server are in an MSCS cluster, but only one instance is active at a time.
Use this solution to perform maintenance, such as operating system patching or upgrades, excluding
vCenter Server patching or upgrades, You perform maintenance on one node in the cluster without
shutting down the vCenter Server database.
Another potential benefit of this approach is that MSCS uses a type of "shared-nothing" cluster
architecture. The cluster does not involve concurrent disk accesses from multiple nodes. In other words,
the cluster does not require a distributed lock manager. MSCS clusters typically include only two nodes
and they use a shared SCSI connection between the nodes. Only one server needs the disks at any
given time. No concurrent data access occurs. This sharing minimizes the impact if a node fails.
Unlike the vSphere HA cluster option, the MSCS option works only for Windows virtual machines. The
MSCS option does not support vCenter Server Appliance.
Note This configuration is supported only when vCenter Server is running as a VM, not on a physical
host.
VMware, Inc.
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