VMware vSphere High Availability Basics

VMware vSphere HA is one of the core feature in a cluster. So let’s bring some more precision about it. High Availability — HA enables a cluster of ESXi hosts to work together so that they can provide high levels of High Availability for virtual machines rather than just an ESXi host by itself. In brief, the High Availability feature is provided by pooling virtual machines and the ESXi hosts in the cluster for protection. Some examples could be host failures, host isolations and application crashes. The requirements for HA is a minimum of two hosts, vCenter Server and Shared Storage.

One ESXi goes down

By default, HA uses management network (Service Console/Management Network VMkernel connections). Let’s take a scenario where there are three ESXi hosts in a cluster. In the event where a physical server (ESXi hosts) goes down, the VM machines will be restarted on the other ESXi hosts. We can also set up applications to be started on the other physical server. From the three physical servers in the cluster one is going to be elected as master. The master server is going to keep track of other ESXi hosts through the heartbeat of other servers. This is done at the management network level. The master server will always expect to have heartbeat responses from other ESXi hosts.

Only the management network went down

If at any moment, the master server detects that a host is down, it will report that to the vCenter server and all servers will be powered on the other ESXi hosts. What is more interesting is that if only the management network goes down, and other network such the datastore network is still working, that would be referred as an Isolation incident. In that case, the vSphere will communicate to the master server and will claim that the ESXi host is still active is through the datastore heartbeat. In that case, the VMs will not be powered onto other ESXi host because it is an Isolation incident.

Only the Datastore network went down

Now, what if only the Datastore network went down and not the Management network?

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