First Published: September 3, 2020

Overview

This Technote is for use with Cisco HX DP Release 3.5, 4.0 and later.

VMware Fault Tolerance (VMware FT) provides continuous availability of mission critical VMs. This is done with contiuous updates to a VM that is identical to the protected VM. The secondary VM is available to immediately replace the original VM in the event of a host or VM failure.

VMware FT works at the VM level and is enabled or disabled there once the environmental prerequisites are met.

Enable the VMware FT service by doing one of the following:

  • Add VMware FT to the existing vMotion network.

  • Create a new vmk (usually vmk3) port group with the VMware FT service activated and using the existing vMotion vswitch. The following is a summary screen example from vmk3 creation with VMware FT logging enabled.

HA and DRS should be enabled on the cluster.

After you enable FT logging, you have the option to right click on a VM and enable VMware FT. When doing this, you must choose a different datastore from the one hosting the existing VMware FT primary VM. If you do not have a second datastore, create one now. You must also choose a different ESXi host for the secondary datastore.

Once the secondary datastore is created, the replication of the primary datastore begins. When replication is complete, your relationship will be established and the VM protected. The amount of time needed to replicate the primary datastore will depend on the size and activity of the VM you are replicating.

It is a good idea to test failover and test secondary restart. This can take some time for active and large VMs. Transitional states are used during these tests to create the new primary-secondary VM relationships.

The dependency on VMware is release specific. For best results, use 6.7 U3. It has been tested and validated with the following configuration :

  • HX 4.0.2c Stretch Cluster

  • UCSM 4.0.4h

  • ESXi: VMware ESXi, 6.7.0, 16316930

  • vCenter: 6.7.0.44000, 16046470


    Note

    Implementation in ESXi and vCenter is very buggy for 6.0 and 6.5, and is prone to failure.

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