Auto start a backup VM

[alfiek]

Hello Vmware professionals,

Looking for some brainstorming help here. I have a single ESXi 5.1 hosts running 6 virtual machines - I'm trying to figure out a way to automatically start a backup clone of a VM if the primary VM dies (blue screen of death) or any other problem that may come up.

VMware monitor will restart a vm if tools can't read a heartbeat but I need someway to tell the host to start a different VM. I can only run a single host - so most conventional ways of doing this are out the window.

Any thoughts ???

Thanks,

Mancil

[DavoudTeimouri]

Hi Alfeik and welcome to community.

You can use Veeam Backup free edition at this regard.

For more information: Veeam Backup Free Edition for virtual machines (VeeamZIP)

BR

[alfiek]

BR,

Thanks for the reply but I don't the Veeam will help. I need something that is going to monitor ServerOne and if ServerOne has a BSOD then hard shut down ServerOne and start ServerOneClone. (ServerOneClone is a known working copy of ServerOne)

Again thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my post.

Mancil

[DavoudTeimouri]

Hi,

You can use FT feature or use replication tools.

Veeam has Backup and Replication tools but you have to pay for use that.

Also You can use VMware Site Recovery Manager at this regard.

BR

[alfiek]

How about using esxcli as a startup script on the solo esxi host? Is there a way that I could write something with esxcli to monitor the primary vm's and if they don't respond to ping request after say 120 second kill the primary vm and startup the backup vm on the host?

[khaliqamar]

I think you can achieve this from your VM cluster

edit settings your cluster and under VMware HA > VM monitoring.