Fault Tolerant VM Issue

[thehack904]

I currently have 2 vm's that run in FT mode. I need to be able to disable FT from the command line (shell) to make some modification to and then re-enable FT.

Our Cluster is hyper-converged with HA enabled on a vSAN. We have several crontab jobs that run on each ESXi host. Since vCenter balances the cluster, the FT VM's will move from one host to another as needed. We are trying not to add another VM that would only run a cronjob and would have to login to each ESXi host and do the maintenance. The thought is to let the ESXi hosts OS do all the heavy lifting since they should have the tools built into them.

I can't seem to find any commands to do this...any help would be greatly appreciated.

[IRIX201110141]

I dont think that you can do this from the ESXi command line. If you enable FT it will create a 2nd VM instance on a different Host/Datastore and this is something that only vCenter can do. The ESXi it self doesnt know very well about it brothers within a cluster.

Sounds more like a job for powershell connecting against a vCenter.

Regards,

Joerg

[thehack904]

Unfortunately I can not use Powercli.  I was given this task based on no new software outside of what had already been purchased before I was hired.  I might be able to create a web api call from /bin/sh within ESXi.  But I am trying to determine what that call would be.

[IRIX201110141]

ESXi shell comes with "wget" and "ssh" so you can call somthing from ESXi to a windows/linux box which runs  feature rich API like POSH or PERL.

Regards,
Joerg

[depping]

Looking at the managed object browser there's a method called "TurnOffFaultToleranceForVM_Task" and when I run this against a VM which has FT enabled it disables it.

[depping]

But to be honest, you should rethink the current strategy. What you are doing, to me, makes no sense. And yes this may be the design they decided to go with before you came onboard, it doesn't mean you need to keep running with it. Also, PowerCLI is freely available, and the number 1 choice for VMware environments when it comes to automation. it makes much more sense to standardize on it, as it will be far easier to maintain in the future

[thehack904]

This is a one off system that is used in a vary unusual way.  Trying to keep the system running while they develop the next system has become quite the task.