VMware HA Future Developments
Having just got out of the Best Practices for VMware HA seminar, I’ve learned of some new developments. Some people will see as essential, some are just cool. The presentation by Nitin Suri was extremely informative and very helpful to give some guidelines about how to configure HA
Here’s the best of the new features (no timescales specified):
- OS failure detection (this will be done using VMware Tools heartbeats)
- Configurable through HA advanced setting
- Configurable timeouts
- Set maximum number of restarts for problem VMs
- Increase cluster member maximum to 32 nodes
- Virtual Center will perform HA specific checks to ensure configuration optimization and eradicate mistakes:
- Host Name DNS resolution
- Redundancy at the Service Console level
- Isolation address checks
- ESX Server 3i (thin hypervisor)full functional support
- Full automated restart for all VMs covered by HA should a whole cluster fail
Unfortunately, there was no timescale indications for any of these features, but I would imagine that most of them will be complete by the time ESX Server 3i is complete.
