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
Host Requirements for Fault Tolerance
You must meet the following host requirements before you use Fault Tolerance.
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Hosts must use supported processors.
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Hosts must be licensed for Fault Tolerance.
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Hosts must be certied for Fault Tolerance. See
hp://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php and select Search by Fault Tolerant
Compatible Sets to determine if your hosts are certied.
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The conguration for each host must have Hardware Virtualization (HV) enabled in the BIOS.
N VMware recommends that the hosts you use to support FT VMs have their BIOS power management
seings turned to "Maximum performance" or "OS-managed performance".
To conrm the compatibility of the hosts in the cluster to support Fault Tolerance, you can also run prole
compliance checks as described in “Create Cluster and Check Compliance,” on page 47.
Virtual Machine Requirements for Fault Tolerance
You must meet the following virtual machine requirements before you use Fault Tolerance.
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No unsupported devices aached to the virtual machine. See “Fault Tolerance Interoperability,” on
page 43.
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Incompatible features must not be running with the fault tolerant virtual machines. See “Fault
Tolerance Interoperability,” on page 43.
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Virtual machine les (except for the VMDK les) must be stored on shared storage. Acceptable shared
storage solutions include Fibre Channel, (hardware and software) iSCSI, NFS, and NAS.
Other Configuration Recommendations
You should also observe the following guidelines when conguring Fault Tolerance.
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If you are using NFS to access shared storage, use dedicated NAS hardware with at least a 1Gbit NIC to
obtain the network performance required for Fault Tolerance to work properly.
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The memory reservation of a fault tolerant virtual machine is set to the VM's memory size when Fault
Tolerance is turned on. Ensure that a resource pool containing fault tolerant VMs has memory resources
above the memory size of the virtual machines. Without this excess in the resource pool, there might
not be any memory available to use as overhead memory.
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Use a maximum of 16 virtual disks per fault tolerant virtual machine.
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To ensure redundancy and maximum Fault Tolerance protection, you should have a minimum of three
hosts in the cluster. In a failover situation, this provides a host that can accommodate the new
Secondary VM that is created.
Configure Networking for Host Machines
On each host that you want to add to a vSphere HA cluster, you must congure two dierent networking
switches (vMotion and FT logging) so that the host can support vSphere Fault Tolerance.
To set up Fault Tolerance for a host, you must complete this procedure for each port group option (vMotion
and FT logging) to ensure that sucient bandwidth is available for Fault Tolerance logging. Select one
option, nish this procedure, and repeat the procedure a second time, selecting the other port group option.
vSphere Availability
46 VMware, Inc.