Essentials Plus license --- HA and FT

[amanzoor]

Hi there,

-Want to use the FT feature so that my VMs are transferred to another host while power on.  At the moment the FT feature is greyed out.  Does my essentials plus does not include it?

- I am using HA and its working fine, the only problem is it power off (not properly) the VMs and then transfers to another host.

-When I want to enable DRS it also asks me for the license?

To my understanding before i bought this essentials plus was:  HA includes all necessary features to keep the VMs up and running seamlessly (without power off).  Is there any software I am missing within my license which would give me DRS and the FT features?  What are my options here?

Help please.

[spravtek]

Hello...

Essentials Plus licenses cover the following:

- High Availability

- Data Recovery

- vMotion

DRS is available from the Enterprise license.

You can find more info in the licensing whitepaper: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

[Duncan Epping]

amanzoor wrote:

Hi there,

-Want to use the FT feature so that my VMs are transferred to another host while power on.  At the moment the FT feature is greyed out.  Does my essentials plus does not include it?

- I am using HA and its working fine, the only problem is it power off (not properly) the VMs and then transfers to another host.

-When I want to enable DRS it also asks me for the license?

To my understanding before i bought this essentials plus was:  HA includes all necessary features to keep the VMs up and running seamlessly (without power off).  Is there any software I am missing within my license which would give me DRS and the FT features?  What are my options here?

Help please.

HA is a restart of a VM --> this happens after the VM went down! So in other words there will always be downtime associated with an HA event.

FT is seemless but has a 1 vCPU limitation at the moment.

DRS --> Load balancing of virtual machines across hosts --> uses vMotion --> seemless migration

[alamosajimmy]

I'm in the same boat.  I'm trying to understand why I bought Essentials Plus with HA if it really doesn't do me ANY good.  Can anyone explain what good HA is?  without FT and DRS that is.

[sparrowangelste]

James Belknap wrote:

I'm in the same boat.  I'm trying to understand why I bought Essentials Plus with HA if it really doesn't do me ANY good.  Can anyone explain what good HA is?  without FT and DRS that is.

Depping explained it perfectly.

If you esxi host went down for any reason, your vms would be turned on the other hosts without manual intervention.

It is probably the best feature out of the 3 to have.

common example: your host has a ram or cpu error, it goes down.

HA will bring your vms up on your other hosts without you needing to scramble.

by the time you figure out they went down because the host is gone, they should be on their way up.

almost no one uses FT as far as I know in production.

DRS is definitly nice, but not a deal killer if you dont have it.

[Duncan Epping]

James Belknap wrote:

I'm in the same boat.  I'm trying to understand why I bought Essentials Plus with HA if it really doesn't do me ANY good.  Can anyone explain what good HA is?  without FT and DRS that is.

Lets assume you have 3 hosts. One of those hosts has a hardware failure. Without vSphere HA you would need to:

1) closely monitor the hosts

2) when a failure occurs connect to your environment

3) go to one of the remaining hosts

4) manually register all VMs are down due to the power failure

5) manually power them on

This will typically take you lets say anywhere between 15 - 20 minutes if you happen to be in the office at your desk and your monitoring service works as expected.

HA does all of this for you fully automated and VMs will be up and ready within literally minutes.

So I do see a HUGE advantage / benefit of having vSphere HA configured!

[spravtek]

Exactly, this is one of the main reasons why customers purchase the Essentials Plus license, when they need to do the minimum to keep the environment up and running or available.

[alamosajimmy]

Ok, so maybe I missed it.  I attempted to put a host into maint.  It failed to move the vm's to another host. (btw, I'm 5.1 all the way).  Isn't that the way you would test HA?  or is HA only activated in a FAILED situation and can't be tested unless I Kill networking, or pull the plugs?

[spravtek]

When you put a host in maintenance mode it will only move the running VM's if your cluster is set to fully automated DRS, otherwise it is a manual intervention.

The best way to test HA is indeed fake a network or other kind of malfunction to one of the hosts in the cluster.

[amanzoor]

I tried to test this HA environment by not putting one of the primary hosts in the maintenance mode (this one has all the VMs dead or alive).  The point here is HA does not gracefully shuts down the powered on VMs it just simply kills them and then powers them on the working host?  Is it normal to have an HA system where it simply kills the powered up vms and then starts them onto a working host?

From my Essentials plus license I am only using my license for 'vsphere and Esxi' thats it, not sure what other softaware are used for from this package or am I going to use them in the future?

FT and DRS:

Just asked my reseller to quote me to include these 2 features in my license and give me the balance so that I can pay that.  As I said I thought HA would cover all the fully automated features, by which HA transports working vms from a troubled host to another host.  I have observed the vpshere vcenter server which comes with 'Essentials plus' package is a base license, it does not gives you FT/DRS unless you upgrade the Vsphere licence to Enterprise.  It is like buying A car and thinkng it will have all the features!  Base Model.  Good job Vmware if I can afford to spend thousands on my new servers, and vmware software, I could add a couple of more hundreds but I expected my 'License' to have all the options/features.  Basically I am stuck and have to buy the Enterprise License to have this whole HA process to be completed.

[chriswahl]

amanzoor wrote:

The point here is HA does not gracefully shuts down the powered on VMs it just simply kills them and then powers them on the working host?  Is it normal to have an HA system where it simply kills the powered up vms and then starts them onto a working host?

You're confused on the various features at the different licensing levels.

Aside from all the commentary in this thread that has explained it, VMware also defines vSphere High Availability (HA) here: http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/high-availability.html

In the event of physical server failure, affected virtual machines are automatically restarted on other production servers with spare capacity. In the case of operating system failure, vSphere HA restarts the affected virtual machine on the same physical server.

That's all HA does in a nutshell. It really has nothing to do with maintenance mode or maintenance activities. The goal of HA is to bring your workloads back online in the event of a failure. The VMs will never come up in a graceful state as there was a failure event that casued them to go down.

If you want workloads to migrate around from host to host automatically by vMotion, then you will need Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). However, you can still manually migrate workloads around by initiating a vMotion yourself. This assumes your host's networking has been configured for vMotion.

[Duncan Epping]

amanzoor wrote:

I tried to test this HA environment by not putting one of the primary hosts in the maintenance mode (this one has all the VMs dead or alive).  The point here is HA does not gracefully shuts down the powered on VMs it just simply kills them and then powers them on the working host?  Is it normal to have an HA system where it simply kills the powered up vms and then starts them onto a working host?

Okay lets drill down a bit, first of all: read the documentation. Really, there is a lot of useful stuff to be found in there.

1) If a host fails then HA will restart the VMs. I can't gracefully power them down as the host goes dead without any warning

2) If the network fails and the host is isolated then HA can "power off VMs" (aka KILL), "shut down VMs" (clean guest OS initiated) or "leave them powered on". This can be configured in your cluster settings and is called "isolation response"

3) If you know a host is going to fail and want to use "maintenance mode" you need DRS. If you don't have DRS you can manually vMotion your VMs to other hosts.

Details can be found here:

https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0092PX72C/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=yellowbricks-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=B0092PX72C&adid=1G93BPHZD94P2G6H3TZB&

[patrickgore]

I'm surprised that VMware doesn't give all or more features like DRS to the essentials plus kits you are locked into three host, Seems like every time you turn around another feature requires a license. I just purchased the essentials plus kit this year and got everything going but i was not happy to find that there are features that do not work requiring additional licensing. There is no plus about it at all. Pretty soon there will be 5 dollars fee per login to vSphere client. I guess its all about the bigger companies they buy more right.

[a_p_]

I would like to have a car with hundreds of horse powers, all kind of comfort features, assistants, etc.

Unfortunately none of the vendors offers that in their lower priced entry level cars.

André