Deploying VMware High

Availability & Fault Tolerance

cluster on HA3969U (NFS)
Application Note

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and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. The information contained herein is subject to
change without notice. Content provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind.
 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Table of Contents

Products covered by this document ...................................................................... 3

About VMware Virtualization .................................................................................. 4

VMware High Availability and Fault Tolerance ...................................................... 6

High Availability.......................................................................................................... 6
Fault Tolerance .......................................................................................................... 7

Setting up VMware vSphere HA with HA3969U..................................................... 8

Step 1: Prepare the environment ............................................................................... 8

Step 2: Enable 2 shared folders on HA3969U to become VMware datastores......... 9
Step 3: Create HA protected VMware Cluster.......................................................... 10
Step 4: Add hosts to the cluster ................................................................................11
Step 5: Set up Fault Tolerance for a Virtual Machine ............................................... 12

Simulating VMware High Availability Failover..................................................... 16

Testing VMware Fault Tolerance Failover ............................................................ 18

Frequently Asked Questions ................................................................................ 20

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Products covered by this document

This document applies to the following product models:

• HA3969U Single Controller 12 Bay

• HA3969U Single Controller 16 Bay
• HA3969U Dual Controller 12 Bay
• HA3969U Dual Controller 16 Bay

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

About VMware Virtualization

The concept of virtualization originated in the 1960s but was not applied to x86
architecture until the 1990s. However, since the 1980s, x86 servers have been
widely adopted in IT environments because they are much cheaper than
mainframe computers. The distributed system of computing allows for reduced
total cost of ownership but may create other challenges, such as low
infrastructure utilization, increased physical infrastructure requirements and
higher IT management costs, plus insufficient failover and disaster protection.
Virtualization is an effective way to deal with these challenges.

In VMware virtualization technology, ESX Server has been the foundation of

virtualized environments.

Figure 1: VMware ESX server

Installed on an x86 or x64-based server, VMware ESX Server provides a

virtualization layer on the host OS to consolidate all hardware resources,
including processors, memory, storage, and networking. It applies them to virtual
machines (i.e. virtual servers) running on the physical server. Each virtual
machine can have its own OS and applications. By sharing hardware resources
across multiple virtual machines, users can improve resource utilization and in
turn greatly reduce costs involved in building physical data center infrastructure.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Besides optimized resource utilization, VMware virtualization also reduces

deployment efforts and simplifies management tasks. Free from physical
considerations and requirements, deploying virtual machines can be done in as
little as just a few minutes. After deployment, managers can easily monitor the
entire virtual data center through a unified management pane. When any of the
physical devices fail, the high availability features of VMware ensure continuous
system operation.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

VMware High Availability and Fault Tolerance

No matter how big your company is and how many business critical servers are
running in your infrastructure, you always expect your data to be safe and
continuously available. Any unplanned downtime in data and IT resources
availability will cause losses in time and money. This is why your virtual
infrastructure should be robust and highly-available enough to guarantee
uninterrupted access to your company’s resources and continuity of business
operations.

VMware provides two solutions that aim at providing access to your virtual
machines at nearly 100% uptime. The first one is High Availability (HA) that
can automatically migrate and restart VMs on a secondary ESXi server in case
of any failures occurred on the primary one. Although being fully automatic,
VMware HA cannot completely meet the needs of business-critical operations
that require 100% uptime, and that is where Fault Tolerance (FT) comes in. FT
keeps a shadow up-to-date copy of the original VM on the second ESXi server,
which can fully eliminate service downtime during the switch between the
original and secondary VMs. Both solutions are illustrated and described below.

High Availability

Figure 2: VMware HA architecture

As you can see from the picture above, VMware gathers all virtual machines into
a shared resource pool or "cluster". After HA is enabled for a cluster, it starts to
monitor ESXi servers’ availability. If one of the servers fails, its VMs will be
migrated and restarted on other servers.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Fault Tolerance

Figure 3: VMware FT architecture

Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability for VMs in case of ESXi
server failure. FT leverages existing vSphere HA clusters, and utilizes the
vLockstep technology to protect specific business-critical VMs by keeping their
identical VMs (or "shadow VMs") on secondary ESX /ESXi servers. When the
primary server fails, the shadow VMs could be restarted instantly, thus
guaranteeing zero downtime and no data, transaction, or connection loss.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Setting up VMware vSphere HA with HA3969U

Storageflex HA3969U models are fully compatible with vSphere High
Availability features and together can help small business minimize unexpected
downtime and guarantee business continuity.

Figure 4: Basic topology for testing environment

Step 1: Prepare the environment

To prepare the test environment for this application note, the following minimum
hardware is required:
• At least two VMware compatible hardware servers running ESXi server
• At least one Storageflex HA3969U storage system
• At least one LAN switch/router

To create a HA cluster, the following requirements have to be met:

• One HA cluster must have at least 2 ESXi hosts
• All hosts in a HA cluster must be licensed for vSphere HA
• All hosts should have access to the same VM networks and datastores
• All hosts in the HA cluster should have static IP addresses or keep the
same dynamic IP address after reboots

Detailed information about HA cluster requirements can be found in VMware

vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp#com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/
GUID-BA85FEC4-A37C-45BA-938D-37B309010D93.html

In order to protect business critical VMs with FT, the following additional
requirements should be met: 8
 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

• There should be at least two hosts running the same FT version/host build
number
• Protected VMs must be stored in virtual RDM or virtual machine disk
(VMDK) files that are thick provisioned
Full list of FT requirements can be found in VMware vSphere 5.5 Documentation
Center:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp#com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/
GUID-83FE5A45-8260-436B-A603-B8CBD2A1A611.html

Step 2: Enable 2 shared folders on HA3969U to become VMware datastores

In order to create a HA protected cluster, both ESXi hosts should have at least
two shared datastores (as per VMware requirements).

After the two datastores (e.g. "nfs_db" and "nfs_db2") are successfully added to
both of the ESXi hosts, you can open vSphere Client and check their information
in the Status column of the Storage panel.

Keep in mind that vSphere HA (vSphere 5) requires at least two shared

datastores to be shared between all hosts in a cluster to guarantee proper
datastore heartbeat detection to function. If you use only one datastore, you may
see the following notification on the ESXi 5.x hosts:

The number of heartbeat datastores for host is 1, which is less than required: 2
The number of heartbeat datastores for host is 0, which is less than required: 2

If you still want to use just one shared datastore without seeing the above
message, you will need to add the "das.ignoreInsufficientHbDatastore" entry in
the cluster settings. Refer to VMware knowledge base article for further
information:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd
=displayKC&externalId=2004739

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Step 3: Create HA protected VMware Cluster

Open vSphere Web Client or vSphere Client, navigate to the datacenter where
you want to create the cluster, and then click New Cluster.

Follow the wizard to complete the setup.

Keep in mind that if you enable HA before ESXi hosts are added to the cluster,
the cluster will not be fully functional until hosts join it.

Also note that you can decide whether you want to enable vSphere DRS
(Distributed Resource Scheduler which is responsible for automated load
balancing), which is compatible with vSphere HA, and is therefore enabled in our
example. For more information about vSphere DRS, refer to VMware vSphere
features overview web page:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/features/drs-dpm.html

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Step 4: Add hosts to the cluster

In vSphere Web Client or vSphere Client, navigate to the cluster you just created,
and select Add Host. You will need to provide host name, username, and
password for the hosts.

If you decide to enable vSphere HA after adding hosts to the cluster, from the
details panel you will see the status of HA agent installation for the newly added
hosts.

In our example (shown below), you can see the process of configuring vSphere
HA after two ESXi hosts are added to the cluster.

vSphere HA is now successfully configured for cluster1, which has two ESXi
hosts (172.24.110.35 and 172.24.110.53)

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

For each host added to a vSphere HA cluster, an HA agent is installed to

communicate with other agents in the cluster. Every host in the cluster serves
either as a master host or a slave host (shown below).

Step 5: Set up Fault Tolerance for a Virtual Machine

After a HA protected cluster is successfully created, you can take VMware High
Availability features to the next level by protecting business critical VMs with
vSphere Fault Tolerance.

Navigate to the virtual machine you want to protect with Fault Tolerance (e.g.
"linux_vm"), right-click on it, and then select either of the following:

• For vSphere Web Client: All vCenter Actions > Fault Tolerance > Turn On
Fault Tolerance.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

• For vSphere Client: Fault Tolerance > Turn On Fault Tolerance

Click Yes when the confirmation message appears.

After the task is complete and FT is successfully enabled for the VM, you can
see the status of the task becoming green.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

FT information for a host can be seen in the Summary tab. In our example, the
ESXi host inside cluster1 is the master host configured for HA and FT, and hosts
one primary VM.

As to the slave host of cluster1, it is also HA protected and configured for FT, but
the VM it hosts is a secondary VM (populated from the primary one).

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

At this point, if you check the VMs for cluster1 (shown below), you will notice a
second instance of the FT protected VM appeared in the list. Original FT
protected VM (“linux_vm”) is running on ESXi host 172.24.110.53, and the
secondary VM (or "shadow copy") of the original VM is running on ESXi host
172.24.110.42.

You can also check vSphere map to see the primary and secondary VMs.

After the entire configuration is done, we can start testing the efficiency of the
solution. In order to do this, we will simulate vSphere High Availability Failover
and then vSphere Fault Tolerance failover.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Simulating VMware High Availability Failover

There are four methods of testing VMware HA described in VMware Knowledge
Base:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd
=displayKC&externalId=2056634

In this example (172.24.110.42 as the primary server; 172.24.110.53 as the

secondary one), we are going to simulate a power-outage situation by
right-clicking on the primary host and selecting Shut Down, and then observe
the duration of VM unavailability on the secondary host.

Keep in mind that the VM in this example (called "ubuntu") is not FT protected.

Now, right-click on the primary host and choose Shut Down. In a few seconds
you will see the host become unavailable.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

The HA protected VM on the server becomes unavailable, too, but it is being

migrated to the secondary host. As soon as the migration is finished, the
protected VM is restarted on the secondary host.

Downtime for this VM is a little bit longer that 1 minute, which under most
circumstances is NOT acceptable for many mission critical applications.

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 Deploying VMware High Availability & Fault Tolerance cluster on HA3969U (NFS)

Testing VMware Fault Tolerance Failover

There are several scenarios when FT is triggered:

• The primary ESX host fails

• The primary VM becomes non-responsive
• FT test is initiated from vCenter Server

Among all the above scenarios, we are going to use vCenter Server to test the
FT capability by right-clicking on a FT protected VM and selecting Fault
Tolerance > Test Failover.

Observing the status in the Recent Tasks panel of vSphere Web Client or
vSphere Client, you can see the process being finished in just a few seconds.

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Protected VM will remain available during this test without any interruption, while
there might be a slight delay depending on the network latency. According to
VMware Fault Tolerance FAQ, this delay is usually less than 1 millisecond (ms).
Refer to VMware Fault Tolerance FAQ for additional information:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd
=displayKC&externalId=1013428

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is VMware Cluster?
A: VMware Cluster allows aggregating and managing multiple hosts resources
as a single collection. Please refer to VMware vSphere Client Cluster
Introduction for more details:

Q: Do vSphere HA and FT leverage storage array replication techniques?

A: No. These two features are Application and OS agnostic.

Q: How can I disable vSphere FT?

A: There are 2 ways to deactivate FT: a) by disabling FT, and b) by turning off FT.
If you disable FT, the secondary VM will be powered off. On the other hand, if
you turn off FT, the secondary VM will be completely removed.

• To disable TF, right-click on the FT protected virtual machine, and

select Fault Tolerance > Disable Fault Tolerance.
• To turn off FT, right-click on the FT protected virtual machine, and select
Fault Tolerance > Turn Off Fault Tolerance.

Q: Where can I obtain more information on vSphere High Availability?

A: Refer to VSphere Availability guide:
http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-es
xi-vcenter-server-55-availability-guide.pdf

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