VMware VMotion enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime.
VMotion lets you:
Below are the pre-requisites for configuring vMotion :
Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
Thin Provision
When we configure multiple hosts for HA cluster, a single host is automatically elected as the master host. The master host communicates with vCenter Server and monitors the state of all protected virtual machines and of the slave hosts. When you add a host to a vSphere HA cluster, an agent is uploaded to the host and configured to communicate with other agents in the cluster.
It is a program that allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host. Each operating system appears to have the host's processor, memory, and other resources all to itself. However, the hypervisor is actually controlling the host processor and resources, allocating what is needed to each operating system in turn and making sure that the guest operating systems (called virtual machines) cannot disrupt each other.
Type 1 Hypervisor:
Type 2 Hypervisor :
VMware HA is used in the event when any of the hosts inside a cluster fails then all the virtual machines running under it are restarted on different host in the same cluster.
Now HA is dependent on vMotion to perform live migration of the vms to different host so vMotion is just used for the migration purpose between multiple hosts which is also used by other functionality like DRS.
NOTE: Anyhow HA can work very will without vMotion as its primary functionality is to restart the vm from the affected host to the working host but this will be service affecting as the vms will be 'powered off' and then 'powered on' on the new host.
When vSphere HA is enabled for a cluster, all active hosts (those not in standby or maintenance mode, or not disconnected) participate in an election to choose the cluster's master host. The host that mounts the greatest number of datastores has an advantage in the election. Only one master host typically exists per cluster and all other hosts are slave hosts.
If the master host fails, is shut down or put in standby mode, or is removed from the cluster a new election is held.
You can place the original (or Primary virtual machine). You have full control with DRS or vMotion to assign it to any node. The placement of the Secondary, when created, is automatic based on the available hosts. But when the Secondary is created and placed, you can vMotion it to the preferred host.
vSphere HA is not dependent on vCenterserver for its operations as when HA is configured it installs an agent into each host which does its part and is not dependent on vCenterserver. Also HA doesnot uses vMotion, it justs restarts the vms into another host in any case of host failure.
Further vSphere DRS is very much dependent on vCenterserver as it uses vMotion for its action for live migration of vms between multiple hosts so in case vCenterserver goes down the vMotion won't work leading to failure of DRS.
NOTE: Using HA in case of any host failure with RESTART the vms on different host so the vms state will be interrupted and it is not a live migration
VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine's guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine. Without VMware Tools installed in your guest operating system, guest performance lacks important functionality.
Installing VMware Tools eliminates or improves these issues:
Here DRS stands for Distributed Resource Scheduler which dynamically balances resource across various host under Cluster or resource pool:
The Master and Slave hosts uses two types of monitoring the status of the hosts
When Fault Tolerance is configured for a virtual machine, vCenter Server need not be online for FT to work. Even if vCenter Server is offline, failover still occurs from the Primary to the Secondary virtual machine. Additionally, the spawning of a new Secondary virtual machine also occurs without vCenter Server.
VMware ESX and ESXi are both bare metal hypervisor architectures that install directly on the server hardware.
Although neither hypervisor architectures relies on an OS for resource management, the vSphere ESX architecture relied on a Linux operating system, called the Console OS (COS) or service console, to perform two management functions: executing scripts and installing third-party agents for hardware monitoring, backup or systems management.
In the vSphere ESXi architecture, the service console has been removed. The smaller code base of vSphere ESXi represents a smaller “attack surface” and less code to patch, improving reliability and security.
A snapshot is a “point in time image” of a virtual guest operating system (VM). That snapshot contains an image of the VMs disk, RAM, and devices at the time the snapshot was taken. With the snapshot, you can return the VM to that point in time, whenever you choose. You can take snapshots of your VMs, no matter what guest OS you have and the snapshot functionality can be used for features like performing image level backups of the VMs without ever shutting them down.
vCenter Server 4.x and vCenter Server 5.x support 1 virtual CPU per protected virtual machine.
This isn't the file containing the raw data. Instead it is the disk descriptor file which describes the size and geometry of the virtual disk file. This file is in text format and contains the name of the –flat.vmdk file for which it is associated with and also the hard drive adapter type, drive sectors, heads and cylinders, etc. One of these files will exist for each virtual hard drive that is assigned to your virtual machine. You can tell which –flat.vmdk file it is associated with by opening the file and looking at the Extent Description field.
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