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
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vSphere HA supports both IPv4 and IPv6. See “Other vSphere HA Interoperability Issues,” on page 26
for considerations when using IPv6.
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For VM Component Protection to work, hosts must have the All Paths Down (APD) Timeout feature
enabled.
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To use VM Component Protection, clusters must contain ESXi 6.0 hosts or later.
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Only vSphere HA clusters that contain ESXi 6.0 or later hosts can be used to enable VMCP. Clusters that
contain hosts from an earlier release cannot enable VMCP, and such hosts cannot be added to a VMCP-
enabled cluster.
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If your cluster uses Virtual Volume datastores, when vSphere HA is enabled a conguration Virtual
Volume is created on each datastore by vCenter Server. In these containers, vSphere HA stores the les
it uses to protect virtual machines. vSphere HA does not function correctly if you delete these
containers. Only one container is created per Virtual Volume datastore.
Create a vSphere HA Cluster
To enable your cluster for vSphere HA, you must rst create an empty cluster. After you plan the resources
and networking architecture of your cluster, use the vSphere Web Client to add hosts to the cluster and
specify the cluster's vSphere HA seings.
A vSphere HA-enabled cluster is a prerequisite for vSphere Fault Tolerance.
Prerequisites
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Verify that all virtual machines and their conguration les reside on shared storage.
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Verify that the hosts are congured to access the shared storage so that you can power on the virtual
machines by using dierent hosts in the cluster.
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Verify that hosts are congured to have access to the virtual machine network.
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Verify that you are using redundant management network connections for vSphere HA. For
information about seing up network redundancy, see “Best Practices for Networking,” on page 38.
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Verify that you have congured hosts with at least two datastores to provide redundancy for vSphere
HA datastore heartbeating.
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Connect vSphere Web Client to vCenter Server by using an account with cluster administrator
permissions.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, browse to the data center where you want the cluster to reside and click
Create a Cluster.
2 Complete the New Cluster wizard.
Do not turn on vSphere HA (or DRS).
3 Click OK to close the wizard and create an empty cluster.
4 Based on your plan for the resources and networking architecture of the cluster, use the
vSphere Web Client to add hosts to the cluster.
5 Browse to the cluster and enable vSphere HA.
a Click the tab.
b Select vSphere Availability and click Edit.
vSphere Availability
28 VMware, Inc.