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
Figure 5‑1. MSCS Cluster for vCenter Server High Availability
vCenter Server
Infrastructure Node
(VM1)
N1
vCenter Server
Infrastructure Node
(VM 2)
N2
vCenter Server
Management Node
(VM1)
M1
vCenter Server
Management Node
(VM2)
M1
MSCS Cluster
SQL Server DB
(VM2)
Node2
SQL Server DB
(VM1)
Node1
MSCS Cluster
Note MSCS as an availability solution for vCenter Server is provided only for management nodes of
vCenter Server (M node). For infrastructure nodes, customers must deploy multiple N nodes for high
availability. You cannot have M and N nodes on the same VM for MSCS protection.
Procedure
1 Power on the VM.
2 Format the two RDM disks, assign them drive letters, and convert them to MBR.
3 Using Windows > Server Manager > Features, install .net.
4 Install vCenter Server on one of the RDM disks and set the start option to manual.
5 Power off the VM.
6 Detach the RDM disks.
Detaching the RDM disks is not a permanent deletion. Do not select Delete from disk and do not
delete the vmdk files.
7 Clone the VM. Do not select the Customize the operating system option.
Do not use the default or custom sysprep file, so that the clone has the same SID.
Note Generalization by sysprep is not available when you create a clone VM as the secondary node
of a cluster. If you use generalization by sysprep, failover of services to secondary node might fail.
Duplicate SIDs do not cause problems when hosts are part of a domain and only domain user
accounts are used. We do not recommended installing third party software other than vCenter Server
on the cluster node.
8 Attach the shared RDMs to both VMs and power them on.
vSphere Availability
VMware, Inc. 98