Top 10 things you MUST read about VMware High Availability (HA)

By Eric Siebert
published: Wednesday, October 22 2008

VMware's High Availability (HA) feature provides a low-cost and simple way to implement high availability when using ESX and is one of its most popular features. While the HA feature may sound simple it can be a bit tricky to configure properly and requires careful planning to make sure it is implemented correctly. The items on this list consist of technical and best practice documents to help you understand the details of how HA works and how to properly configure it. Additionally on this list are some great blog posts from experienced administrators that describes there real life experiences with using and configuring HA. Once you are done reading through the items on this list you should have a firm understanding of HA and how to set it up properly in your environment.

VMware High Availability - Concepts, Implementation and Best Practices

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMwareHA_twp.pdf

A white paper from VMware that provides a high level overview of HA, technical details on how it works, how to implement it and best practices for using it.

HA Technical Best Practices

http://kb.vmware.com/Platform/Publishing/attachments/1002080_fHA_Tech_Best_Practices.pdf

A technical presentation from VMware on HA technical details, best practices and troubleshooting.

Resource Management Guide

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_resource_mgmt.pdf

VMware's official documentation on resource management which information on how to configure and manage HA.

VMware HA Guidelines and Best Practices

http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/mylearn?classID=11016

A presentation from VMworld 2007 by VMware engineers that covers a technical overview of HA, configuration best practices, troubleshooting tips and technology directions.

VMware HA and DRS Capacity Planning

http://www.kingston.com/branded/pdf_files/HAnDRSCapacity_WP.pdf

A white paper from Kingston that covers HA specifically as how memory plays a role towards it and how to understand memory statistics and configure memory settings to work best with HA.

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/wp-content/uploads/VMware...

A document put together by a VMware Technical Account Manager to help answer frequently asked questions about using, configuring and understanding HA.

So how exactly does HA's admittance algorithm work?

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/so-how-exactly.html

A post from Chad Sakac that discusses in detail how the frequently misunderstood HA admittance algorithm works.

VM HA - service console networking, isolation behavior

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/07/vm-ha---service.html

A post from Chad Sakac that discusses how HA isolation behavior works as well as the best way to configure the service console networking to work with HA.

Virtual Machine Failure Monitoring

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35_25_vmha.pdf

A white paper from VMware that describes the new VM Failure Monitoring feature that is part of HA starting with ESX 3.5 and how to configure it.

HA Advanced Option settings

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/10/06/update-ha-advanced-options-2/

A post from Duncan Epping that lists all the many Advanced Option settings that can be used to configure HA with.