6.5.1

Contents
About vSphere Availability 5
1
Business Continuity and Minimizing Downtime 7
Reducing Planned Downtime 7
Preventing Unplanned Downtime 8
vSphere HA Provides Rapid Recovery from Outages 8
vSphere Fault Tolerance Provides Continuous Availability 9
Protecting the vCenter Server Appliance with vCenter High Availability 10
Protecting vCenter Server with VMware Service Lifecycle Manager 10
2
Creating and Using vSphere HA Clusters 11
How vSphere HA Works 11
vSphere HA Admission Control 19
vSphere HA Interoperability 24
Creating a vSphere HA Cluster 27
Conguring vSphere Availability Seings 29
Best Practices for VMware vSphere
®
High Availability Clusters 38
3
Providing Fault Tolerance for Virtual Machines 41
How Fault Tolerance Works 41
Fault Tolerance Use Cases 42
Fault Tolerance Requirements, Limits, and Licensing 42
Fault Tolerance Interoperability 43
Preparing Your Cluster and Hosts for Fault Tolerance 45
Using Fault Tolerance 47
Best Practices for Fault Tolerance 51
Legacy Fault Tolerance 53
4
vCenter High Availability 57
Plan the vCenter HA Deployment 58
Congure the Network 63
Congure vCenter HA With the Basic Option 64
Congure vCenter HA With the Advanced Option 65
Manage the vCenter HA Conguration 68
Troubleshoot Your vCenter HA Environment 73
Patching a vCenter High Availability Environment 78
5
Using Microsoft Clustering Service for vCenter Server on Windows High
Availability 79
Benets and Limitations of Using MSCS 79
Upgrade vCenter Server in an MSCS Environment 79
VMware, Inc.
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