6.5.1
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
- 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
- Index
Creating and Using vSphere HA
Clusters 2
vSphere HA clusters enable a collection of ESXi hosts to work together so that, as a group, they provide
higher levels of availability for virtual machines than each ESXi host can provide individually. When you
plan the creation and usage of a new vSphere HA cluster, the options you select aect the way that cluster
responds to failures of hosts or virtual machines.
Before you create a vSphere HA cluster, you should know how vSphere HA identies host failures and
isolation and how it responds to these situations. You also should know how admission control works so
that you can choose the policy that ts your failover needs. After you establish a cluster, you can customize
its behavior with advanced options and optimize its performance by following recommended best practices.
N You might get an error message when you try to use vSphere HA. For information about error
messages related to vSphere HA, see the VMware knowledge base article at
hp://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033634.
This chapter includes the following topics:
n
“How vSphere HA Works,” on page 11
n
“vSphere HA Admission Control,” on page 19
n
“vSphere HA Interoperability,” on page 24
n
“Creating a vSphere HA Cluster,” on page 27
n
“Conguring vSphere Availability Seings,” on page 29
n
“Best Practices for VMware vSphere
®
High Availability Clusters,” on page 38
How vSphere HA Works
vSphere HA provides high availability for virtual machines by pooling the virtual machines and the hosts
they reside on into a cluster. Hosts in the cluster are monitored and in the event of a failure, the virtual
machines on a failed host are restarted on alternate hosts.
When you create a vSphere HA cluster, a single host is automatically elected as the master host. The master
host communicates with vCenter Server and monitors the state of all protected virtual machines and of the
slave hosts. Dierent types of host failures are possible, and the master host must detect and appropriately
deal with the failure. The master host must distinguish between a failed host and one that is in a network
partition or that has become network isolated. The master host uses network and datastore heartbeating to
determine the type of failure.
Sphere HA Clusters (hp://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid2296383276001?
bctid=ref:vSphereHAClusters)
VMware, Inc. 11