Welcome to Module 8
Sharing Resources and vCenter Clustering
By: Imran Afzal
Migrating VM
vMotion Network
ESXi1 ESXi2
Will cover COLD migration
• Without vMotion
• Without VMWare cluster
• Without HA feature enabled.
By: Imran Afzal
vMotion
vMotion Network
ESXi1 ESXi2
By: Imran Afzal
vMotion (Live Migration)
• VMware vSphere vMotion or live migration allows you to move an entire running virtual
machine from one physical server to another, with no downtime.
• The virtual machine retains its network identity and connections, ensuring a seamless
migration process.
• Transfer the virtual machine’s active memory and precise execution state over a high-speed
network, allowing the virtual machine to switch from running on the source vSphere host to
the destination vSphere host. This entire process takes less than two seconds on a gigabit
Ethernet network.
Live migration allows you to:
• Automatically optimize virtual machines within resource pools
• Perform hardware maintenance without scheduling downtime or disrupting business
operations
• Move virtual machines away from failing or underperforming servers.
By: Imran Afzal
VMWare Cluster
• A cluster is a group of hosts. When a host is added to a cluster, the
resources of the host become part of the resources of the cluster.
• The cluster manages the resources of all hosts
• Clusters enable, vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere Distributed
Resource Scheduler (DRS), and the VMware vSAN features
• A cluster is useless if HA or DRS features are not used
By: Imran Afzal
VMWare vSphere High Availability (HA)
• vSphere HA clusters allow ESXi hosts to work together as a group and
provide performance assurance and higher levels of availability for hosted
virtual machines
• High Availability provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection
against hardware and operating system outages within your virtualized IT
environment.
• High Availability allows you to:
• Monitor VMware vSphere hosts and virtual machines to detect
hardware and guest operating system failures.
• Restart virtual machines on other vSphere hosts in the cluster without
manual intervention when a server outage is detected.
• Reduce application downtime by automatically restarting virtual
machines upon detection of an operating system failure
By: Imran Afzal
VMWare vSphere High Availability (HA)
• When you add a new host to a vSphere HA cluster, an agent is uploaded to
the host and configured to communicate with other agents in the cluster
• Every cluster has one master host, and all other hosts in the cluster act as
subordinate hosts. The host roles are automatically determined through an
election process, and the master host is responsible for detecting and
appropriately resolving failures in the cluster.
By: Imran Afzal
Migration of VMs with HA
LIVE
ESXi1 ESXi2
By: Imran Afzal
HA Cluster Requirement
• All ESX/ESXi hosts must be same version and same patch level.
• All hosts must be licensed for vSphere HA
• A minimum of 2 ESXi servers in a cluster is required
• Each host must have a vMotion NIC configured
• There must be at least 2 shared HA heartbeat datastores
attached to each host (NFS or NAS)
• All VMs must be on shared storage
• All hosts must have access to a shared datastore (NFS or NAS)
• VMware HA must be enabled on the cluster.
By: Imran Afzal
Shared Storage for HA
1 ✓ Create a new VM on VMWare workstation player
✓ Install CentOS
✓ Add 2 new hard disks
2 ✓ Create partition
✓ Setup and share NFS
✓ Mount NFS on vCenter
3 ✓ Move VM storage from local to shared
✓ Setup and configure HA
By: Imran Afzal
Shared Storage for HA
• NFS service can be setup through a dedicated NAS device
OS
vCenter
NAS
Skip the next 2 videos and go straight to
“Setup NFS from NAS device”
By: Imran Afzal
www.utclisolutions.com
Install Linux
1
• Install Linux CentOS version 7 on VMWare
Workstation Player
• Specification
• 1G RAM
• 1 CPU
• 20G HDD
By: Imran Afzal
Setup and Share NFS
2
• Install NFS
• # yum install nfs-utils libnfsidmap –y
• Enable NFS on start
• # systemctl enable rpcbind
• # systemctl enable nfs-server
• # systemctl start rpcbind
• # systemctl start rpc-statd
• # systemctl start nfs-idmapd
• Add 2 disks from workstation player (100G and 5G)
• Reboot Linux VM
• Create xfs partitions on Linux
• 100G share = VMs
• 5G share = vCenter heartbeat
• # fdisk /dev/sdb
• n → p → enter → enter → w
• # mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb1
By: Imran Afzal
Setup and Share NFS
2
• Create NFS mount points and mount
• # mkdir /shared
• # mkdir /qoram
• # mount /dev/sdb1 /shared
• # mount /dev/sdc1 /qoram
• Add NFS mounts to /etc/fstab for auto-mount
• # /dev/sdb1 /shared xfs defaults 0 0
• # /dev/sdc1 /qoram xfs defaults 0 0
• Add the entry to /etc/exports
• # /shared *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
• # /qoram *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
• Export the NFS share
• # exportfs -rv
• Stop and disable firewall
• # systemctl stop firewalld
• # systemctl disable firewalld
By: Imran Afzal
Setup and Share NFS from NAS Device
• In this video we will learn…
• Physical layout of a NAS device
• Setup storage RAID, pool and 2 volumes (100G and 10G)
• Create shared folders (shared = 100G and qoram = 10G) over NFS service
which will be mounted on vCenter
Please note…
If you have setup NFS on Linux VM then you can simply skip
this video, however I would highly recommend that you watch it
to understand how NFS can be setup over a NAS device
By: Imran Afzal
www.utclisolutions.com
NAS Device for Filesystem Sharing
• In this video we will learn…
• Physical layout of a NAS device
• Setup, configure and manage NAS device
• Create shared filesystem (NFS and Samba)
• Mount shared folder from the NAS device to Linux and Windows
Mount NFS and Migrate VM
3
• Mount NFS on hosts
• 192.168.19.5 and 192.168.19.6
• Move VMs storage from local to shared
4 • Create vSphere cluster, Setup and configure HA
By: Imran Afzal
Setup and Configure HA
4
• Create vSphere cluster without HA/DRS
• Move hosts into cluster
• Setup and configure HA
• Test HA.
By: Imran Afzal
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is a feature
included in the vSphere Enterprise Plus.
• Using DRS, you can: Improve service levels by guaranteeing
appropriate resources to virtual machines
• Provide highly available resources to your workloads.
• Balance workloads for optimal performance.
• Scale and manage computing resources without service disruption.
DRS
vCenter Cluster
By: Imran Afzal
Sequence of Starting and Shutting
VMWare vSphere Environment
Starting order:
1. NFS Server (Linux VM)
2. ESXi running vCenter
3. Other ESXi
4. vCenter VM (appliance) (5-10m)
Shutdown order:
1. vCenter VM (wait until complete shutdown)
2. ESXi running vCenter
3. Other ESXi
4. NFS Server (Linux VM)
By: Imran Afzal
Datastore Cluster
• A datastore cluster is a collection of datastores with shared resources
and a shared management interface. Datastore clusters are to
datastores what clusters are to ESXi hosts. After you create a
datastore cluster, you can use vSphere Storage DRS to manage
storage resources.
• When vSphere Storage DRS is enabled on a datastore cluster,
vSphere automates the process of initial virtual machine file
placement and balances storage resources across the cluster to avoid
bottlenecks. vSphere Storage DRS considers datastore space usage
and I/O load when making migration recommendations.
400G
100G 100G 100G 100G
By: Imran Afzal
