Recently there was an article published on the Microsoft Virtualization Blog which compared Hyper-V’s High Availability/Quick Migration capabilities to VMware’s VMotion. (VMblog pointed me towards the article) In the second article the writer responds on a large amount of reactions he had regarding VMotion being superior:
After my last blog I received almost two dozen email […]

PeterB posted a topic about all known HA advanced options on the Dutch VMUG. If anyone has more options please post ‘em and let’s try to make this list as long as possible:

das.failuredetectiontime - Amount of milliseconds, timeout time for isolation response action
das.isolationaddress - IP adres the ESX hosts uses for it’s heartbeat. It will […]

During the last couple of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 implementations I encountered some weird DRS/HA behavior:

During the reboot of a VM ESX decided to vmotion the VM, as you can imagine this took a lot longer than normal due to the memory being excessively active.
When the DRS Affinity Rules in a two cluster node […]

The company I work for, Ictivity, recently started testing with Xen(not Xensource!) and HA clustering. There were two case studies, one based on Suse and one based on Red Hat. Both definitely have it’s own advantages and disadvantages but it seemed promising to me. Today I noticed a blog on ONLamp.com about how to set […]

Just noticed the new errors HA produces at the console when a host is isolated in ESX 3.5:
Node isolated from network. Either repair network or override agent startup using option -noiso
And when the host returns from isolation:
Node no longer isolated, will restart
This makes troubleshooting a lot easier! Thanks VMware

I never noticed this, but during the configuration of HA in my testlab I received some weird errors. I just could not enable it on the ESX Server that ran ESX 3i, and I’m pretty sure DNS works fine. Today I received an email about 3i and support on HA, which states:
Support for VMware High […]

The last couple of weeks more blogs and topics appeared around the warning VirtualCenter gives when there’s no service console redundancy. Several people posted about a workaround to clear this warning. The workaround is very easy: temporarily assign an additional nic to the service console vSwitch and reconfigure your HA. Notice that I used ” […]

I’ve been testing with the experimental feature Virtual Machine High Availability(aka VM Failure Monitoring) for a couple of days now. I must say it just does what VMware claims in the PDF, resetting a VM within the configured time when a the heartbeat is lost. But one thing that struck me is that there’s hardly […]

VMware updated the PDF about High Availability with extra advanced options for ESX 3.5/VC 2.5. They’ve also added recommendations for additional Service Console redundancy. Until now I’ve always worked with a two nic based Service Console instead of a second Service Console on the VMKernel network, will test with the second Service Console to see […]