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
8 Set up the MSCS cluster configuration again and set the startup type of all vCenter Server services to
manual.
9 Shut down the primary node and detach the RDM disks, but do not delete them from the datastore.
10 After the reconfiguration is complete, select VM > Clone > Clone to Template, clone the secondary
node, and change its IP and host name.
11 Keep the secondary node powered off and add both RDM disks to the primary node. Then power on
the primary node and change its IP and host name.
12 Add both RDM disks to the secondary node. Then power on the secondary node.
13 Open Failover Cluster Manager and configure the MSCS cluster.
You must use the cluster role IP and host name.
What to do next
When configuring the MSCS cluster, you must add vCenter Server services such as the VMware AFD
service and the VMware vCenter Configuration service to the role as resources.
Configure MSCS for High Availability
Use the following steps to set up Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) as an availability solution for
vCenter Server.
Prerequisites
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Create a virtual machine (VM) with one of the following guest operating systems:
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Windows 2008 R2 Datacenter
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Windows 2012 R2 Datacenter
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Add two raw device mapping (RDM) disks to this VM. These disks must be mounted when they are
added and the RDM disks must also be independent and persistent.
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Create a separate SCSI controller with the bus sharing option set to physical.
Note Since this configuration uses a SCSI controller with the Bus Sharing option set to Physical,
backup and restore is not supported. You must to use a host-based agent for backup or restore.
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Set the Virtual Device Node to newly created SCSI controller 1.
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Open the MSCS drive and create two folders: one for VC data and another for VC installation.
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Install a Platform Services Controller instance before you install vCenter Server and provide its FQDN
during the installation.
vSphere Availability
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