Can I have fail over with ESXi?

[JFHA]

Hey guys,

I was asked today if can setup an ESXi machine with 4 VMs in it, no problem here, but then I was asked to setup another ESXi with exactly the same machines as the first one to have them as failover in case one of the ESXi dies the second one kicks in for redundancy, but I don't know if this is possible, can I do something like this? if so how?

Thanks.

[IRIX201110141]

There is VMware HA for more than 15 years now.  2 or more Hosts and the hosts have access to a shared (vSAN also possible.. but..) storage where all the VMs(data) exists. If one Hosts goes down... than HA kicks in and restart the VMs on another Host in the Cluster.

You can start reading at High Availability - vSphere | VMware vSphere

Or think about VM replication with vSphere Replication or better Veeam Backup&Replication.

Regards,
Joerg

[jburen]

And another sophisticated option is Fault Tolerance: How Fault Tolerance Works

[NathanosBlightc]

Create a ESXi Cluster and add both of the ESXi host as its member.

Then you can configure the HA feature inside the cluster settings for protecting your VMs against the host failures

But remember this point, even via using the HA, however you will encounter to downtime of the VMs for a few minutes (depends on many factors also the VM config and the second host resources) but they will bring up again in the available ESXi host automatically.

If you need to more availability and reduce to level of failure to the zero downtime, you can configure the FT feature for each of your critical VM that you have (consider FT limitation based on your vSphere version)

[Rajhere]

VMware vSphere High Availability delivers the availability required by most applications running in virtual machines, independent of the operating system and applications running in it. High Availability provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against hardware and operating system outages within your virtualized IT environment.

The VMware High Availability (HA) cluster supports two or more hosts (up to 64 per cluster) to reduce the risk of unplanned downtime.

you can read more here - High Availability - vSphere | VMware vSphere