New Training: vSphere High Availability

In this 7-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Keith Barker describes, explains, and demonstrates a feature of vSphere High Availability that can be used to increase the availability of VMs. Watch this new VMware training.

Watch the full course: VMware Certified Professional

This training includes:

• 7 videos

• 56 minutes of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Intro to vSphere HA

• HA Overview

• How HA Determines Failures

• Configuring HA

• Verifying HA

• HA Hands On Lab

• Lab Walkthrough: vSphere HA

What Does High Availability Mean in vSphere?

Moving computing resources to a virtualized environment within enterprise IT systems has a lot of benefits. Virtualized environments can reduce TCO (total cost of ownership) while also making IT administration easier. By moving computing resources to a virtualized environment, IT professionals can worry less about individual pieces of hardware while moving their systems under the umbrella of a single management interface. By doing this, virtual machine hosting software, like vSphere, can offer other management features like high availability settings.

These high availability settings for virtual machines are a bit different than other parts of the IT infrastructure. For instance, high availability might mean using a RAID setup to ensure storage systems can keep running when they experience an issue or that a load balancer distributes networking traffic between multiple webservers so a single server doesn't become flooded. In the virtual environment though, high availability means that VMs are constantly running without issues.

That's the job of high availability mechanisms in vSphere. vSphere will automatically restart VMs if it detects an issue with a guest machine. Likewise, if a host machine experiences an issue, vSphere will restart that machine in a different location. The goal of high availability in the virtual environment is simply to make sure virtual machines are turned on and operating at all times.