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7 Replies Last post: Oct 7, 2009 10:27 PM by tom howarth  

How To Disable Fault Tolerance (FT) without vCenter? posted: Oct 7, 2009 12:21 PM

Click to view kegwell's profile Enthusiast 95 posts since
Apr 26, 2006

I have a bit of a strange situation here. I setup a lab environment to test FT on 2 blade servers. One of the virtual machines I created and enabled FT on was vCenter. Since the creation of my lab environment, one of the ESX blades was removed from the cluster and repurposed for another non-VMware use before I was able to disable FT on the VMs I was testing. Since then, a new test blade was put in place. So, I'm back to having two ESX blades. However, when I try and add the blade now hosting vCenter w/ FT it says:

Add standalone host
***
Cannot add a host with virtual
machines that have Fault
Tolerance turned On as a
stand-alone host.
Administrator
VCENTER
10/7/2009 2:20:05 PM
10/7/2009 2:20:05 PM
10/7/2009 2:20:06 PM

My question to you is, how can I disable FT without vCenter? I cant get the enable/disable/off FT without logging into vCenter, but I cant add the host with vCenter to get to that screen. Is there something in a configuration file that I can change that will at least mask the presence of FT so I can get past this?

Click to view vmroyale's profile Virtuoso 1,712 posts since
Jun 15, 2007
Hello.

See if this discussion helps at all.

Good Luck!
Click to view Troy Clavell's profile Guru 6,238 posts since
Oct 12, 2007
look at this, which is linked in the discussion Brian pointed out
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10279

If you have fault tolerant enabled on a specific VM and would like to disable, you'll want to use disable operation

[vi-admin@scofield ~]$ ./ftCLI.pl --server reflex.primp-industries.com --username primp --vmname Devastator --operation disable
Enter password:
Disabling FT secondary VM for "Devastator" on host "everest.primp-industries.com" ...
        Successfully disabled FT protection for "Devastator"!


At the bottom of the page are the files to download

Click to view tom howarth's profile Guru 7,346 posts since
Jul 25, 2005

I am curious as to why you consider manually moving files and re-registering easier than using a simple script. you simply upload the script and run it with the details supplied as per the previous post. it will result in a lot cleaner result. What for example did you do to your original FT enabled guest?? Remember the implementation of a Virtual Infrastructure requires you to move out of your comfort zone a little.

automation via scripting is not a black art but a valuable tool in the armory.

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: www.planetvm.net
Contributing author for the upcoming book "VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment”. Currently available on roughcuts

Click to view lamw's profile Champion 2,803 posts since
Nov 27, 2007
As the other's have pointed ... the script I wrote would work but unfortunately FT (Fault Tolerance) is a feature that comes with vCenter and you will not be able to disable/enable/turn off FT without vCenter.

Having said that, can you turn off the VM that currently has FT enabled? If you can, which might end up being your only option ... you can edit the .vmx entry to remove any entries regarding FT. I would highly recommend making a backup of your configs before doing so.

From what I've gathered there is an FT uuid in the .vmx such as this:

uuid.ft = "50 12 1d b9 57 f2 42 86-79 27 51 f7 14 90 50 fc"


and with the VM directory there is a VM FT configuration file called shared.vmft specifying the secondary and it's location/etc. that looks something like:

/vmfs/volumes/4ab39fe8-706cd754-2292-0050568d51a5/test # cat shared.vmft

.encoding = "UTF-8"
generation = "1"
primary.uuid = "52 85 35 7b 49 41 7b 28-9b 50 bb 7b 8c 90 4d 71"
primary.vmxFilePath = "/vmfs/volumes/4ab39fe8-706cd754-2292-0050568d51a5/test/test.vmx"
secondary.secondary0.enabled = "1"
secondary.secondary0.uuid = "50 12 1d b9 57 f2 42 86-79 27 51 f7 14 90 50 fc"
secondary.secondary0.valid = "1"
secondary.secondary0.vmxFilePath = "/vmfs/volumes/4ab39fe8-706cd754-2292-0050568d51a5/test/test_1.vmx"
uuid = "50 12 1d b9 57 f2 42 86-79 27 51 f7 14 90 50 fc"


You probably need to move this file and update the .vmx and see if you can re-gain control of the VM to add your host back into the cluster.

It also might be worthwhile to file a ticket with VMware support to see if there is a way of disabling FT w/o vCenter.

Good luck

=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at: http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/
vGhetto Script Repository
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
VMware Developer Comuunity
Twitter: @lamw

http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/vexpert_silver_icon.jpg

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

Click to view tom howarth's profile Guru 7,346 posts since
Jul 25, 2005
Ah the joy of having access to your lab I knew there was info in the vmx file and folders but sat in a grotty hotel rooms I could not check. Once again William you have come up trumps :D

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: www.planetvm.net
Contributing author for the upcoming book "VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment”. Currently available on roughcuts

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