Hello Guys,
We have completed Vcenter Appliance installation on my last post , now we are going to add our ESXI hosts to our Vcenter and we will have a look for HA in our Vcenter. Very important part involving from this point; in order to get this feature we need Shared Storage where we can put all VM’s on it. (Such popular brands NetApp, HPE, Dell EMC, IBM, Hitachi etc.)
After version 6.5 (Vcenter) all managerment console moved to Vsphere Web Client and it’s supported by Flash and HTML5, but at the moment all features working with Flash edition. in the future posts we will see Vmware Vcenter 6.7 use HTML5 and Flash is almost not in use…
As we can see below, when we try to reach our management console, it gives both options (Highlighted with yellow)
Now we are going to add our ESXI hosts to Vcenter and all management will be from our Vcenter system. I am also going to show HA configuration, details will be on different future posts. Now I am going to login with my administrator@vpshere.local account.
I am going to create a New Datacenter and my servers will be here in HA Cluster environment. But did you think and ask this question, Why New Datacenter? Vcenter giving the opportunity of wide management features, for example we have servers in London and also in Cardiff. Vcenter allowing us to manage different datacentres from one management console.
I set my DC in London;
We can either add hosts and then create the cluster zone, however we can first cluster after that we could add ESXI host devices. I am going to create the cluster first and clicking on New Cluster.
Cluster name is Cluster1
Here is important that we are going to click Vsphere HA, HA is going to be our backup availability for example if one of the Host start giving error, VM’s will start on second host machine.
DRS also needs to be checked, DRS can be use if you have many datastores and related VM’s on the system. This will help you to balance your capacity for the hosts. For example you have 5 ESXI Hosts and one of the ESXI using more RAM rather then other… DRS allow and balance all VM (Virtual Machines) to other hosts in order to give best performance and use the correct amount of resources such as CPU and Disk size.
Our Cluster is ready , now time to add our ESXI host machines;
Lockdown mode is very important part because if it’s Normal; ESXI hosts are not accessible remotely. And if it’s Strict; access only made by Vcenter and console will not work. I am going to choose disable for this time as it’s seem best option for me but it can be something else according to security policy etc etc.
Now we have summary of our configuration, I am going to do same config for the second host as well.
Now I add my both ESXI hosts to the Vcenter Cluster system , now it’s getting Vcenter agent and configuring/enabling HA feature.
Now whole system has been installed. We can say that med. size an organization got HA enabled virtualized environment. Is it all? Of course NO , now time to check if the system working as expected or not ? ! ?
VM1 virtual machine working on ESXI02.glab.local ESXI host. Now we are going to restart ESXI02 host and VM1 will start on ESXI01 host device. I have my Domain Controller else where (out of virtualization test environment.) and we will make the test via sending ping packets.
And uptime of the VM1
The most important part (My opinion it might be not for other people 
) once you complete the HA configuration, we need to make changes on vmkernel adaptor. Vmotion needs to be checked and it needs to be done for both ESXI hosts.
During the installation default network comes as VMNetwork and it needs to be same for both ESXI hosts. I will give deep dive information regarding these details in my future posts.
Now I am going to re-start my ESXI !
VM is registered on ESXI02
VM is back to normal ! ESXI host has fault but HA worked perfectly fine and VM is working as expected !
