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 if it works like expected… cause according to the VMware recommendations it saves up till 40 seconds in recovery time.
Changing the default isolation response settings in a cluster:
- Isolation response settings for VMs will be set to “power off” by default, but can be modified on a cluster-wide basis.
- Select a cluster->VMware HA->Advanced Options.
- Add the das.powerOffOnIsolation = <value> option/value pair to the cluster’s settings where <value> represents either “true” to keep the default, or “false” to change the default and leave all VMs powered on in case of isolation.
Adjusting the default “slot size” used for HA admission control:
- If no VM reservations are set in a cluster VMware HA assumes cluster-wide average” CPU and memory reservation sizes of 256 Mhz and 256 MB to use in admission control calculations. Alternative values can be specified instead.
- Select a cluster->VMware HA->Advanced Options.
- Add the das.vmMemoryMinMB = <value> and das.vmCpuMinMHz = <value> option/value pairs to the cluster’s settings where <value> represents the desired values in terms of MB and MHz. Higher values will reserve more space for failovers.
Robert says
HA is in my point of view the feature with the most bad documentation. The referenced PDF is a real good start – hopefully there will be more documentation on the advanced features of HA
I’m looking for the abbility to isolate a ESX host from the Cluster after he rebooted 3 times or so.
r.
Duncan says
I’ve never seen this feature or option… unfortunately cause it would be a nice feature. VM-HA has this feature so it shouldn’t be difficult to implement I guess.