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vSphere Evaluation Tasks
High Availability
Introduction
Ensuring the availability of virtual machines within an environment is of paramount concern to administrators.
VMware HA alleviates these concerns by providing protection from failures within the following three key layers:
• The infrastructure layer
At this layer, VMware HA monitors the health of the virtual machine and will attempt to restart the virtual
machine when a failure, such as the loss of a physical host, occurs. This protection is independent of the OS
used within the virtual machine.
• The OS layer
Through the use of VMware Tools installed within the OS, VMware HA can monitor the OS for proper operation.
This protects against such failures as an unresponsive OS.
• The application layer
With some customization or with a third-party tool, an administrator can also monitor the application running
within the OS for proper operation. In the event of a failure of the application, HA can be triggered to restart
the virtual machine hosting the application.
In this section, you will learn how to enable, configure, and test the operation of HA to provide basic high
availability services for your virtual machines at the infrastructure layer.
Prerequisites
Before continuing, it is important that the environment be configured properly. Refer to the "System
Requirements" section of this document and verify that the environment you are using is configured as
documented. Specific areas of interest include the following:
• Ensure that you have a working management network with all hosts in the environment.
• Verify that all of the virtual machines are online.
• Have at least one virtual machine running on each host.
• Validate that you have access to VMware vCenter™ utilizing the vSphere Client.
Enabling HA
Enabling HA is a straightforward process that simply entails editing the properties for the cluster. The following
steps will guide you through this process.
VMware vSphere 5.0 Evaluation Guide –
T E C H N I C A L W H I T E P A P E R / 1 2
Volume One
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