VMware HA and DRS requirements.

[nanair01]

I was going through vmware website just brushing up my knowledge on VMware HA and DRS and found a conflict. Can someone please confirm it.

One of the requirement for VMware vmotion and thus DRS is found to be "The virtual machine configuration file should not reside on a VMFS located on the shared datastore."(Ref : http://www.vmware.com/support/vc13/doc/c2vmotionreqs12.html).

But VMware HA states one of the requirements as "for clusters enabled for VMware HA, all virtual machines and their configuration files must

reside on shared storage (Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI SAN, or SAN iSCI NAS), because you need to

be able to power on the virtual machine on any host in the cluster" (Ref : http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_ha_wp.pdf )

What does this mean? Or the VMware vmotion constraint is wrong? I am just confused!

[Linjo]

The first statement is for a very old version of VirtualCenter 1.3 / ESX 2.5 and can be disregarded.

Best regards,

Linjo

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[Rubeck · Accepted solution]

The first link are old requirements for vMotion and applies to Virtual Center 1.3 and ESX2.

"The virtual machine configuration file should not reside on a VMFS located on the shared datastore".. This applies to ESX 2 hosts. Back then the VM configuration file (.vmx) was located locally on the ESX host running the VM in /home/vmware per default... During vMotion this file were moved to the local dir on the target host..

This was changed in ESX3, which along with Virtual Center 2 also introduced HA ....

For HA being able to work all VM related files need to reside on shared storage... This makes all nessesary VM files available to other clusters hosts at all times. (hard to fetch various files from a dead host).

/Rubeck

[nanair01]

Oh wow, so a simple version of storage vmotion was persistent on those days ..... he he.

Thanks guys for your timely advice, I just got confused and was wondering..... Thanks again and here goes the points