Brian Atkinson's Blog

RE: VMware Fault Tolerance Requirements and Limitations

andreleibovici — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:25:16 GMT

Good study case published at http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com.au/articles/35270-Case-study-Forget-1-GE-on-VMware-unless-you-can-do-without-vMotion-high-availability-and-fault-tolerance

"An attempted direct connection of NIC to VM eventually delivered close to 10GE performance, but with the unfortunate side effect of being possible only under VMDirectPath, a product that is not currently compatible with vMotion or VMware tools that offer high availability and fault tolerance."

Checklist for would-be users of 10GE under VMware:
* Check which PCI slot your NIc uses and make sure it can deliver the speed you need
* Turn on VT-X, NUMA, SMT and VTD in your server BIOS
* Use the vmxnet3 driver (or its successors) and not the e1000 driver"

NOTE - If VMware recommends vmxnet3 driver for 10GE Fault Tolerance will not work.

http://virtualcloud.wordpress.com

RE: VMware Fault Tolerance Requirements and Limitations

andreleibovici — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:39:20 GMT

In adittion to PVSCSI devices VMware FT cannot be enabled on a virtual machine using VMXNET3

RE: VMware Fault Tolerance Requirements and Limitations

rahmat — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:53:23 GMT

*Ensure that the virtual machines are NOT using more than 1 vCPU. (SMP is not supported.)

not good point .. it's hard to implement this FT for critical Machine (VM) .. especially at our environment min vCPU for our critical machine are 2 ..

RE: VMware Fault Tolerance Requirements and Limitations

AndreLei — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:48:13 GMT

Great Post. Thanks!
Andre