VMCP, or VM Component Protection, has been around for a while. Many of you are probably using this to mitigate storage issues. However, what if the VM network fails? Well, that is a problem right now… if the VM network fails then there’s no response from HA. This by many customers is considered to be a problem. So what would we like to propose? VM Component Protection for Networking!
How would this work? Well the plan would be to allow you to enable VM Component Protection for Networking for any network on your host. This could be the vMotion network, different VM networks etc. On this network HA would need to have an IP address it could check “liveness” against of course, very similar to how it used the default gateway to verify “host isolation”.
On top of that, besides validating liveness through an IP address, of course, HA should also monitor the physical NIC. If either of the two would not work, well then HA should take action immediately. What this action will be will depend on the type of failure that has occurred. We are considering the following two types of responses to a failure:
- If vMotion still works, migrate the VM from impacted host to a healthy host
- If vMotion doesn’t work, restart the impacted VM on a healthy host
In addition to monitoring the health of the physical NIC, HA can also use in guest/VM monitoring techniques to monitor the network route from within the VM to a certain address/gateway. Would this technique be useful?
What do you think? Please provide feedback/comments below, even if it is just a “yes, please!” Please help shape the future of HA!