VMware HA Cluster – how it works
When HA cluster is first created the VMs are configured with cluster default settings concerning the VM restart priority, host isolation response, and VM monitoring. But it can be changed, and you can specify specific behavior for each virtual machine. You can for example change this settings for some high priority VMs, like your domain controller VMs etc, which needs to be started before anything else.
In this video from VMware Techpubs Channel, you’ll learn which possibilities you have when configuring the HA cluster and how HA protects your VMs from hosts failure.
In VMware vSphere HA cluster, there is a Master host election when the cluster is first created. All the other hosts are slaves. The master host is responsible for monitoring the hosts connectivity with slaves hosts, and deals with different possible issues that can happens:
- hosts gets network isolated
- host fails (hardware or other problem)
- host loses connection to the master host
In this video you’ll get basic overview on how HA works and what’s your options when host became isolated, so if the host has lost its management connectivity, but the VMs are still running. Leave the VMs running? Shut them down and fail-over to other hosts or power them Off and fail-over?
For VM monitoring options inside the HA cluster, you have 3 options there:
- Leave running (default)
- Shut Down (requires VMware Tools)
- power off
This short 3 minutes video is narrated by Keith Farkas,Senior Staff Engineer at VMware.