Implement and Maintain Complex VMware HA Solutions

There isn’t much that is different for this over what was in the VCAP4-DCA Blueprint objective. I’ve been watching the HA videos from the Trainsignal VMware vSphere 5 Training course and the vSphere 5 Clustering Tech Deepdive book by Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping. Due to HA and DRS being revamped for vSphere 5 I think the book covers it all perfectly and more. Duncan also did a blog posting covering HA here: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/ (it’s a serious deepdive)

Knowledge

• Identify the three admission control policies for HA
• Identify heartbeat options and dependencies

Skills and Abilities

• Calculate host failure requirements
• Configure customized isolation response settings
• Configure HA redundancy

Management Network – Simply down to setting two management connections/vmkernel ports

Datastore Heartbeat – this is new to vSphere 5 and is therefore something new to this objective. I’ve learnt it via the clustering tech deepdive book and from this blog posting by Duncan http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/07/26/ha-architecture-series-datastore-heartbeating-35/ It is also covered in the trainsignal videos and is something you should know from your VCP5 studies

Network partitions – This is also new and is covered in the book and the deepdive posting. I also learnt how to fix it should a host alert that it is network partitioned as I think this could be a task and so I learnt this kb article http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2012649 it is also covered here

• Configure HA related alarms and monitor an HA cluster
• Create a custom slot size configuration
• Understand interactions between DRS and HA
• Analyze vSphere environment to determine appropriate HA admission control policy
• Analyze performance metrics to calculate host failure requirements
• Analyze Virtual Machine workload to determine optimum slot size
• Analyze HA cluster capacity to determine optimum cluster size

Due to objective 3 having DRS as objective 3.3 and this objective being about HA it has worked in well that I have been re-reading the vSphere 5 Clustering Tech Deepdive book as it covers both of these 100%. All that you need to do now is practice doing it all in your lab

Gregg