VMworld: Fault Tolerance

Here’s a couple of little snippets from the FT – Overview and Best Practice session (BC2961).  Most of the material covered, I’ve seen before in the recently released FT whitepaper.  However here’s the extra bits in noticed that was new to me:

  • When enabling FT on a VM in a DRS cluster, vCenter sets the DRS settings for the primary and secondary VMs to manual by default.  This is regardless of the cluster settings.  This doesn’t prevent VMotion, but prevents excessive VMotioning of FT enabled VMs.
  • The error logging for FT is pushed to the VMkernel log.  (This is not the inter-host clustering traffic that VMware refers to as FT logging).

Documentation for FT is currently thin on ground, so I’m looking forward for some more technical detail on what happens in the background.

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