Objective 4.2 – Deploy and Test VMware FT

Knowledge - Identify VMware FT hardware requirements

• All associated hosts must have access to the same network(s) and shared storage.
• A vSwitch or port group with a uplink of at least 1GB for FT logging.
• Both hosts that are hosting the FT virtual machines must have processors in the same family and be within +/- 400MHz of each other
• Host CPU must be certified to support FT on VMware HCL
• Hardware virtualization support must be enabled in the BIOS
• NPIV is not supported
• NPT/EPT are unsupported

Knowledge - Identify VMware FT compatibility requirements

• Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) must be enabled for an FT enabled VM to utilize DRS.
• vSphere 5 Enterprise or Enterprise Plus license
• VMs with multiple vCPUs are not supported for vSphere FT
• Virtual disks must be either virtual mode RDM or eager-zeroed thick
• Guest OS Support
• No VMware Snapshots
• USB devices, sound devices, serial and parallel ports are not supported
• Network adapters need to be either vmxnet2, vmxnet3 or E1000.
• CDs and floppies cannot be pointed to a physical device.
• FT does not support a paravirtualized kernel
• vMotion is supported for FT enabled VMs, but svMotion and by association SDRS are not supported.
• Hot Add - Once a VM has been FT enabled, hot add changes are not supported.

Skills and Abilities - Modify VM and ESXi host settings to allow for FT compatibility \ Use VMware best practices to prepare a vSphere environment for FT & Prepare the infrastructure for FT compliance
If HA is enabled for the cluster the Profile Compliance tab reports the cluster requirements for HA as being either Compliant or non Compliant for all aspects of HA including FT.

Here we can see a non compliant cluster,  to note it doesn't say which aspect is non compliant only the state.

Here we can see a cluster which is showing as Compliant for all HA features includingFT

Skills and Abilities - Configure FT logging

Using a vSwitch with an uplink of at least 1GB,  configure a VMkernel port group to have Fault Tolerance logging Enabled.

Skills and Abilities - Test FT failover, secondary restart, and application fault tolerance in a FT Virtual Machine
Enable FT on a VM

Right click VM and select Fault Tolerance -> Test Failover