Setting up HA

[admin]

Hi All,

We have VMware Fault Tolerance setup in our server virtualization environment.

We are drafting up some plans for View to host 500 virtual desktops.

We have 8 blades (dual socket 6-core Nehalem), with great connectivity (Flex 10 LOM, Flex 10 MEZ).

It was suggested to me that using HA would be smarter than using FT for these VM's.  The VM's are not mission critical, and a brief interruption in service is tolerable.

Is it generally a best practice to setup HA in View Environments?  Is that the way to go?

Should we create a separate network to handle HA traffic like we would for FT traffic?

Thanks,
Drew

[Gerrit_Lehr · Accepted solution]

That suggestion is right, you would not want to waste double the needed ressources by protecting every desktop with FT. If a host goes down all the VMs will power up again using another host with HA. So after say one minute the environment is restored. Using FT would failover immediately, but every VM would use it's needed ressources twice: once on the active host and again on the protecting host. Also, with 500 VMs, the FT network load would be huge.

[admin]

Gerrit,
Thank you.  With HA, will the VM's do a full power on/boot up when moved to the new host?  Or is it like vMotion where the contents of their memory and disk are on the shared storage, and the VM's remain online during the process?

For example, let's say I have have a Vice President browsing the Internet, and he is moved with HA to another host after a failure, will his IE session be available just like vMotion? 

Thanks again!

Drew

[mittim12]

If HA kicks in than the VMs will be powered down on the one host and powered up on another host.   Whatever activity was happening on that guest will be lost.  

[admin]

mittim12

Thanks for the clarification!

Drew