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 ” workaround” cause I definitely don’t see this as a solution for the problem. With the current technology there’s not much reason not to have a redundant service console in my opinion, especially when you are using HA. I know a nic hardly ever breaks but in this case probably more than 8 VM’s rely on this nic, the physical switch and the network cable it’s attached to. [Read more…] about Service Console redundancy
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Virtual Machine High Availability
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 any evidence that HA did it’s job, in other words no events logged in VirtualCenter as far as I can see. [Read more…] about Virtual Machine High Availability
New version of the High Availability best practices and advanced features PDF
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.
[Read more…] about New version of the High Availability best practices and advanced features PDF