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
Best Practices for Interoperability
Observe the following best practices for allowing interoperability between vSphere HA and other features.
vSphere HA and Storage vMotion Interoperability in a Mixed Cluster
In clusters where ESXi 5.x hosts and ESX/ESXi 4.1 or earlier hosts are present and where Storage vMotion is
used extensively or Storage DRS is enabled, do not deploy vSphere HA. vSphere HA might respond to a
host failure by restarting a virtual machine on a host with an ESXi version dierent from the one on which
the virtual machine was running before the failure. A problem can occur if, at the time of failure, the virtual
machine was involved in a Storage vMotion action on an ESXi 5.x host, and vSphere HA restarts the virtual
machine on a host with a version earlier than ESXi 5.0. While the virtual machine might power-on, any
subsequent aempts at snapshot operations might corrupt the vdisk state and leave the virtual machine
unusable.
Using Auto Deploy with vSphere HA
You can use vSphere HA and Auto Deploy together to improve the availability of your virtual machines.
Auto Deploy provisions hosts when they power-on and you can also congure it to install the vSphere HA
agent on hosts during the boot process. See the Auto Deploy documentation included in vSphere
Installation and Setup for details.
Upgrading Hosts in a Cluster Using vSAN
If you are upgrading the ESXi hosts in your vSphere HA cluster to version 5.5 or later, and you also plan to
use vSAN, follow this process.
1 Upgrade all of the hosts.
2 Disable vSphere HA.
3 Enable vSAN.
4 Re-enable vSphere HA.
Best Practices for Cluster Monitoring
Observe the following best practices for monitoring the status and validity of your vSphere HA cluster.
Setting Alarms to Monitor Cluster Changes
When vSphere HA or Fault Tolerance take action to maintain availability, for example, a virtual machine
failover, you can be notied about such changes. Congure alarms in vCenter Server to be triggered when
these actions occur, and have alerts, such as emails, sent to a specied set of administrators.
Several default vSphere HA alarms are available.
n
Insucient failover resources (a cluster alarm)
n
Cannot nd master (a cluster alarm)
n
Failover in progress (a cluster alarm)
n
Host HA status (a host alarm)
n
VM monitoring error (a virtual machine alarm)
n
VM monitoring action (a virtual machine alarm)
n
Failover failed (a virtual machine alarm)
N The default alarms include the feature name, vSphere HA.
vSphere Availability
40 VMware, Inc.