Nested ESXi 5.0 FT host profile compliant i7-2600k

[brilliantc]

Hi gurus,

I created two VM to run ESXi 5.0 on VMware Workstation

The two virtual ESXi hosts are able to run nested 64-bit VMs

I want to experiment FT and host profile complaint, then I ran into two issues (perhaps it is one)

1. Failure against Cluster Requirement (Fault Tolerance is not supported on this host. Reason: incompatibleCPU)

2. I am unable to do FT nested VMs without manually vMotion them or suspend/ shut down the nested VMs.

I searched around, and it seems dealing with hardware.

I am wondering, do I really need to buy a...say... a server that run Xeon E5-2630 in order to achieve what I want to test?

Would be nice if anyone can let me know how you go through testing FT in nested environment.

Thanks

[abhilashhb]

Go to the Edit VM Settings---->Options----->Advanced----general----> On the right side you will find Configuration paramaters of your VM. Add these three rows there.

Name: replay.allowFT Value: true

Name: replay.supported Value: true

Name: replay.allowBTOnly Value: true

After you add the lines it should work. Let me know if it does.

[brilliantc]

Thanks Abhilash,

Most threads i have read suggesting modification on nested VMs, as you indicated

Name: replay.allowFT Value: true

Name: replay.supported Value: true

Name: replay.allowBTOnly Value: true

I think there is ONE thread saying the vESXi hosts need to have similar change in adding two rows....

1. allow Custer

2. allowBTOnly

I "kind of" got nested VMs FT working, I am able to...

1. test FT

2. Test second VM restart

But I am getting really terrible performance, tried with a nested VM running Fedora 20 x86 on gnome, it look more than 20 mins to load up the login screen

I noticed the disk maximum queue is over 100

I am unsure if my lab was setup wrong or the nested FT simply will have such high latency, as I can see the FT logging bandwidth is like < 1000 Kbps all the time.

I believe they are correlated

I then tried with nested VM with DOS 6.22, and the FT trial performance is reasonable

Well.....I really wish to go further testing, but looks like nested FT is really difficult to achieve

[abhilashhb]

What is your system configuration? RAM, CPU,NIC and also storage?

[brilliantc]

Physical Host 1,

ESXI 5.0

i7 950 (with VT-x EPT enabled), 24GB Memory, 1x1GbE

RAID1 (2x500GB)

RAID10 (4x1TB) datastore for vESXi hosts, vCenter, Openfiler (OS)

RAID1 (2x1TB) VMFS for vLUN01 (in perspective of Openfiler), this is where nested VMs live

RAID1 (2x1TB) VMFS for vLUN02 (in perspective of Openfiler), there is where nested VMs live

Also running another two vESXi 5.1 in VMware workstation 9 on my PC

i7 2600k (with VT-x EPT enabled), 32GB, 1x 1GbE

both vESXi hosts are running on SSD

all vESXi hosts has 4 vmNIC, two port groups

Management & vMotion port group (2x vmNICs)

VMs port group (2x vmNICs)

I think cluster was configured to use "same datastore as VM" for HA and DRS, but I am unsure if that affect FT performance.