vSphere 7 Foundations 4.8 - vSphere Cluster Features - Proactively Move VMs for High Availability
High Availability will restart your VMs in the event of a hardware failure. But there is still downtime. When we know we have an issue with a host that is likely to cause an outage, such as a critical hardware alarm, we can use vMotion to move the Virtual Machines to proactively avoid an outage. But wouldn't it be great if we could automate that? At the end of this lecture, you'll know how use vSphere Proactive HA to integrate vSphere with your monitoring platform, so that vSphere HA can vMotion VMs before an outage occurs.
Glossary for Module 4
High Availability (HA)
vSphere feature which restarts VMs on another host if one host fails.
vMotion
vSphere feature which allows a VM to be moved from one host to another without downtime, at the request of the vSphere administrator
Storage vMotion
vSphere feature which allows a VM’s storage to be moved to another storage device without downtime, at the request of the vSphere administrator
Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
A vSphere feature that allows vMotion to work across hosts with different CPU generations, for example when newer hosts have been added.
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS and Storage DRS)
A vSphere feature which uses vMotion and Storage vMotion to automatically move VMs between hosts or storage between devices to balance the load and improve performance
Proactive HA
A vSphere feature that, through integration with a supported monitoring tool, pre-emptively moves VMs to another host without downtime when hardware is degraded on a host, to avoid downtime if the host fails.
Predictive DRS
A vSphere feature which uses vRealize Operations Manager to predict changes in VM activity and move VMs in advance.
Orchestrated Restart
A series of rules that can be configured on a set of VMs so that HA understands their relationships, and ensures that inter-dependent VMs are started in the correct order.
Module Overview
In this module, we looked at all of the features that drove us to use vSphere in the first place, and these are the cornerstones of almost any vSphere environment. Understanding the relationships is very important, and remember that most of them rely on the hosts being part of a cluster and having the same resources - in particular network and storage.
References
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSp...
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020...
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSp...
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSp...
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSp...
Module 4 Playlist
• vSphere 7 Foundations Module 4 - Configure...