vbrowncoat's Posts

Please check the resources I sent you links to. There is a whole chapter on DPM calculations in the Deepdive book.
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking so I'm going to take a stab at this. Just like with DRS there is an automation level for DPM (Automatic, Manual, Off) and a DPM Threshold setting (1 (conse... See more...
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking so I'm going to take a stab at this. Just like with DRS there is an automation level for DPM (Automatic, Manual, Off) and a DPM Threshold setting (1 (conservative) - 5 (aggressive)). These settings work much like they do for DRS and will dictate when DPM will power off and power on hosts. They are based on the same thing that DRS is, resource utilization of the cluster and improvement that is expected from the suggested host power state recommendation. If you want to read more about it I'd suggest either the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deep Dive book - http://smile.amazon.com/VMware-vSphere-Clustering-Deepdive-Volume/dp/1478183411/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top,  http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Distributed-Power-Management-vSphere.pdf or VMware vSphere 5.1
From the vSphere Documentation Center If a host fails and its virtual machines need to be restarted, you can control the order in which this is done with the VM restart priority setting. You can... See more...
From the vSphere Documentation Center If a host fails and its virtual machines need to be restarted, you can control the order in which this is done with the VM restart priority setting. You can also configure how vSphere HA responds if hosts and how vSphere HA responds if hosts lose management network connectivity with other hosts by using host isolation response setting. These settings apply to all virtual machines in the cluster in the case of a host failure or isolation. You can also configure exceptions for specific virtual machines. See Customize vSphere HA Behavior for an Individual Virtual Machine. VM Restart Priority VM restart priority determines the relative order in which virtual machines are placed on new hosts after a host failure. Such virtual machines are restarted, with the highest priority virtual machines attempted first and continuing to those with lower priority until all virtual machines are restarted or no more cluster resources are available. Note that if vSphere HA fails to power on a high-priority virtual machine, it does proceed to try any lower-priority virtual machines. Because of this, the VM restart priority cannot be used to enforce a restart priority for a multiple virtual machine application. Also, if the number of hosts failures exceeds what admission control permits, the virtual machines with lower priority might not be restarted until more resources become available. Virtual machines are restarted on the failover hosts, if specified. The values for this setting are: Disabled, Low, Medium (the default), and High. If you select Disabled, vSphere HA is disabled for the virtual machine, which means that it is not restarted on other ESXi hosts if its host fails. The Disabled setting is ignored by the vSphere HA VM/Application monitoring feature since this feature protects virtual machines against operating system-level failures and not virtual machine failures. When an operating system-level failure occurs, the operating system is rebooted by vSphere HA and the virtual machine is left running on the same host. You can change this setting for individual virtual machines. ------ The thing with VM restart priority is that it currently the order that startup of VMs is attempted after an HA event. It isn't a guarantee that VMs will start in a particular order. It may work for your environment though. I'd recommend testing it out if you can. Here is a post from www.yellow-bricks.com talking about Restart Priorities and some of the issues with them in more detail: I set restart priorities but still my VMs seem to be powered on in a different order And here is a rough idea of what we're looking at for futures: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/09/13/ha-futures-restart-order/ Hope this helps.
Got it, thanks. This is a common request and like I mentioned before something we're working on. I take it you've already tried using the restart priority?
So what about that environment or your workloads makes what HA can do now unsuitable? You asked about startup delay and auto startup/shutdown settings. Can you give me a better idea of what yo... See more...
So what about that environment or your workloads makes what HA can do now unsuitable? You asked about startup delay and auto startup/shutdown settings. Can you give me a better idea of what you mean by these (what you're looking for) and what your use case is? Cheers!
Have you already taken a look at these? VMTN community on VMware & Openstack: OpenStack Getting started with VMware and Openstack whitepaper - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMWare... See more...
Have you already taken a look at these? VMTN community on VMware & Openstack: OpenStack Getting started with VMware and Openstack whitepaper - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMWare-Getting-Started-with-OpenStack-and-vSphere.pdf OpenStack Blog for VMware |  - VMware Blogs VMware Integrated OpenStack (Beta) | United States Hope this helps
Answers in RED: for VMs that are part of HA cluster is it still not possible to control the startup delay and auto startup/shutdown settings? - Correct any plans for this in vsphere 6? -... See more...
Answers in RED: for VMs that are part of HA cluster is it still not possible to control the startup delay and auto startup/shutdown settings? - Correct any plans for this in vsphere 6? - I'm sorry I can't speak to versions but this is definitely something we are interested in and working on. To help make sure we're on the right track can you tell me more about your use case and specific requests?
From Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping's 5.1 Clustering Deepdive book: In general DPM will look at powering down a host if it's utilization level is below 44% and look at powering up a host if ... See more...
From Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping's 5.1 Clustering Deepdive book: In general DPM will look at powering down a host if it's utilization level is below 44% and look at powering up a host if other hosts utilization is above 82%.
If this doesn't answer your question would you please clarify what you are asking? If you are asking will HA restart a VM on another host if the first host loses access to it's storage, it depe... See more...
If this doesn't answer your question would you please clarify what you are asking? If you are asking will HA restart a VM on another host if the first host loses access to it's storage, it depends. If it's an APD situation, in current versions, no. If it's a PDL situation then it depends. See these links for more details: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/03/16/permanent-device-loss-pdl-enhancements-in-vsphere-5-0-update-1-for-stretched-clu… PDL Conditions and High Availability http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/08/01/change-in-permanent-device-loss-pdl-behavior-for-vsphere-5-1-and-up/
Not sure what you mean by "too low"? If you are using the default calculation for slot size (what I would recommend) the remaining slots will tell you how many more VMs you can turn on. You would... See more...
Not sure what you mean by "too low"? If you are using the default calculation for slot size (what I would recommend) the remaining slots will tell you how many more VMs you can turn on. You would have to determine if that was "too low". To determine the number of slots available you can look here: Cluster>Monitor>vSphere HA>Summary. This will show you: Total slots, used slots, available slots, slot size, etc. Does this answer your question? GS Khalsa
I'm going to assume that your remote site is it's own cluster? If not, there are a number of additional complications that would take a long time to get into. Also, keep in mind that the HA pr... See more...
I'm going to assume that your remote site is it's own cluster? If not, there are a number of additional complications that would take a long time to get into. Also, keep in mind that the HA process is independent of vCenter. It doesn't require vCenter to operate, just for configuration setup/changes. Answers in RED Scenario 1: VMs in protected mode are shutdown on ESXi02 Will HA on the ESXi01 think this is an error and try to recover the VM's on ESXi01? - No, if you shutdown a VM HA will not take action Scenario 2: ESXi02 has shutdown all it's VM's and now powered down Will ESXi01 think ESXi02 is isolated and now try to recover those VM's on ESXi01?- No, No Does this answer your questions?
With dissimilar sized hosts you want to think of it in terms of your largest host and determine the % from there. So taking your example of 4 hosts and calculating for memory: Host 1     128GB... See more...
With dissimilar sized hosts you want to think of it in terms of your largest host and determine the % from there. So taking your example of 4 hosts and calculating for memory: Host 1     128GB Host 2     256GB Host 3     512GB Host 4     512GB Total memory: 1408GB Taking one of the largest hosts (512GB) and determining what % that host represents of our total resources (to calculate for n+1) we get 512/1408 = .364 or 37%. Setting your percentage based admission control policy setting for memory to this will ensure you have enough resources to restart all VMs if you lose any of your hosts. Does this answer your question? GS Khalsa
Welcome to the forums. I'll try and answer your questions. Keep in mind that you're talking about 3 different products/features (vSphere HA, vSphere Replication and vMotion) that have different f... See more...
Welcome to the forums. I'll try and answer your questions. Keep in mind that you're talking about 3 different products/features (vSphere HA, vSphere Replication and vMotion) that have different functionality. Host A fails what do I use? if HA powers on VMs in Host B then I will end up with duplicated powered on VMs? wouldn't I use the replicated VMs? - You won't end up with duplicated powered on VMs because with vSphere Replication the replica VM isn't running. HA will re-start the VM that was running on Host A on Host B, no need to restore from the replica copy. Again wouldn't I have the same issue when using vMotion? - No, vMotion will move a running VM from one host to another (eg. from host A to host B). There isn't any downtime for a vMotion. HA is used to protect against host or operating system issues. It will restart a VM if the host fails or if the operating system crashes (if it is configured for this). vSphere Replication is used for replicating VM(s) from one datastore to another. The datastores can be at the same site, different sites or even different vCenters. vSphere Replication supports RPOs of 15 mins - 24 hrs as well as Multiple Point in Time replication. vMotion is used to migrate a running VM from one host to another host with no downtime. Storage vMotion allows for the movement of a VMs storage (from one datastore to another) without downtime. Hope this helps. If you have more questions about any of these products/features I'd suggest looking into them on the VMware site, blogs and these forums. If you still can't find an answer ask it here.
Hi Kiran, 1. If App HA supports the service (IIS in this case - it is supported) you are trying to monitor all you have to do is install/configure App HA and its components (vApp, Hyperic, age... See more...
Hi Kiran, 1. If App HA supports the service (IIS in this case - it is supported) you are trying to monitor all you have to do is install/configure App HA and its components (vApp, Hyperic, agent(s), etc). App HA will monitor (based on your preferences) if the service stops or if it's unstable (starts/stops a certain number of times in a set period of time) and will restart the service or the VM. 2. If I understand your question, there is an App HA maintenance mode that can be used if the protected application is being upgraded, patched, etc. Let me know if this doesn't answer your question.
Keep in mind that HA admission control only ensures that remaining host(s) have sufficient resources for the VMs to start (if they don't have reservations defined - if they do have reservations d... See more...
Keep in mind that HA admission control only ensures that remaining host(s) have sufficient resources for the VMs to start (if they don't have reservations defined - if they do have reservations defined it will ensure that after a host failure those are available). HA doesn't guarantee performance. In your example, if you created reservations for the VMs on host 1 that consume all CPU resources on that host. Admission control would not allow you to start any VMs on Host 2. Does that make sense?
This is functioning exactly as expected. In the first case you are triggering the isolation response of the host. It looks like you have it set to power off/shutdown so the VMs get restarted o... See more...
This is functioning exactly as expected. In the first case you are triggering the isolation response of the host. It looks like you have it set to power off/shutdown so the VMs get restarted on another host. 2nd case, this is what HA does, you have a failure of a host and the VMs running on it are brought up on another host. The only way for the VMs running on a host to not crash when the host does is to utilize something like VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) or to proactively vMotion the VMs prior to the outage. 3rd case, this is a All Paths Down (APD) issue and in the current version this is the expected behavior. Here are some links for more information about APD: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2004684 vSphere 5.1 Storage Enhancements – Part 4: All Paths Down (APD) | CormacHogan.com
Are you running into a throughput issue when using 1 nic for FT? Currently FT only supports using a single nic (1G or 10G)
What happens to VMs running on the vSwitch with the single uplink port if this uplink goes down?  - nothing, the VM will continue to run as is. HA currently will restart the VM on another host if... See more...
What happens to VMs running on the vSwitch with the single uplink port if this uplink goes down?  - nothing, the VM will continue to run as is. HA currently will restart the VM on another host if the host it is on fails, or depending on settings if it becomes isolated. VM HA will restart the VM if it PSODs. App HA will restart a failed service or failing that restart the VM. There currently isn't a solution to the issue that you outline utilizing HA. Do they vmotion to another host which has the same network or do they stay as they are, just disconnected from the network? - see previous Is there any way (other than multiple uplinks) to protect this VM from permanent network outage? - Not that I'm aware of. If that is the issue you're trying to deal with an additional uplink would be the easiest way to add redundancy/resiliency.