Can I build a HA cluster with no heartbeat from the VM's?

[martinwa]

Hi,

I have some virtual firewalls on two ESX hosts.

The firewalls run Unix and it is not (at the moment) possible for me to install vmware tools.

Is it possible to create a HA cluster where VMs are booted up on the other host in case of a host fail?

Best regards

Martin

[mofr]

yes sure. look here:

To avoid unnecessary resets, the VM Monitoring service also monitors a virtual machine's I/O activity. If no heartbeats are received within the failure interval, the I/O stats interval (a cluster-level attribute) is checked. The I/O stats interval determines if any disk or network activity has occurred for the virtual machine during the previous two minutes (120 seconds). If not, the virtual machine is reset. This default value (120 seconds) can be changed using the advanced attribute das.iostatsinterval.

vSphere Documentation Center

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

VMware Tools are only required if you want to use Virtual Machine Monitoring in addition to HA's default host monitoring. For host monitoring only (i.e. restarting VM's in case of a host failure) there's no requirement for VMware Tools.

André

[martinwa]

Thank you

Helpfull information.

Regads

Martin