topic Two servers - HA in ESXi Discussions

Two servers - HA

oSAlj — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 15:29:47 GMT

Hi,

I have two servers in my homelab:
HPE DL360 Gen10
HPE DL380 Gen10

They both have the same configuration:
CPU: 2x Silver 4116
RAM: 256GB
SSD: 4x 1TB in RAID10
NIC: 4x onboard 1gbps and 2x SFP+

I wonder if I can configure it as follows.
I have a VM called Win10 - 4x vcpu, 16GB RAM, 96GB HDD

I would like this VM to be on both servers and when one stops working (e.g. power supply failure), this VM would be immediately available on the other server.

I guess this is high availability?

Is it possible to make such a configuration?
Both servers run ESXI 7.0.3
One server has a VM created with vCenter 7

Thanks for help!

Re: Two servers - HA

a_p_ — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 16:33:25 GMT

Not exactly.

HA will restart VMs one another host if the original one fails. This requires that the VM's files are located on shared storage, that is available to both hosts.

What you describe sounds more like Fault Tolerance (FT), which basically maintains a shadow VM on another host, which takes over in case the original host fails. However, FT also required shared storage for some of the VM's files.
Also note that proper licensing is required for FT itself, and depending on the number of vCPUs that a VM has.

See Fault Tolerance Checklist and Fault Tolerance Requirements, Limits, and Licensing for details.

André