vsphere HA

[ErinO]

Hi,

I have 2 ESX Serve vsphere connected to a SAN with VC. Two host has been add to a cluster with HA Enabled.

What are the various way to test vmware HA?

For Example,

1) ESX 1 with VM Running and when you shutdown the ESX, the VM machine will get restarted and power on in ESX 2 ( Willt he VM get restarted or it just vmotionw without shuttdown?

2)

3) ...etc

[Troy_Clavell]

one good way to test HA is to pull the power plug on one of your ESX Hosts. The VM's will go down, but be restarted on the other host in your cluster.

You should read this as well, great article, which is still relevant today on how HA calculates failover.

[AndreTheGiant]

Another test that can be used ONLY if you have set a isolation response diffent from "leave powered-on" is un-plug all network cables.

In this case the HA test will fail, host get in isolation state, and VM will be powered-on on the other nodes.

Andre

[VMmatty]

The thing to remember about VMware HA is that in all scenarios the VMs will be powered down hard (no graceful shutdown) and then restarted on another ESX host. HA does not use VMotion to move the VMs between ESX hosts.

As already stated, my favorite way to test HA is to simply power off the ESX host. If you have access to out of band management software like HP iLO or Dell iDRAC then you can easily press the virtual power button without having to go into the server room. Then you can watch HA in action...

[bulletprooffool]

I'd always test this with non production VMs first,.

Depending on your rules, the machines may get shut down, or remain running on the isolated host.

You will need to either shut the hiost down, or pull the network cables to get the VMs loading on the other host.

Watch out though, if you are using shared storage with file locking enabled and your test host is still able to access the storage, it may lock VMs (if they are not told to shut down by the source server), in which case they may not start on the new host and the tests may fail.