After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.
The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.
Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time. [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design