Fault tolerance hardware with vSphere 5.5

[Mike2015]

Hi,

I'm trying to test vSphere 5.5.

So i have 5 physical machines : 2 ESXi, 1 Domain Controller, 1 vCenter, and a Freenas for iSCSI.

ESXi01 : Intel Core i3 540 with 8 GB RAM and 120 GB SSD, 2 NIC

ESXi02 : Intel Core i3 4150 with 8 GB RAM and 250 GB SATA, 2 NIC

Hosted an OpenBSD VM (128 MB RAM, 1vCPU)

I tested :

- vMotion works

- High Availability works (with EVC enabled).

Now I tried Fault Tolerance : no success

To have FT, do i need absolutely the same CPU on the 2 ESXi ?? Any advices ?  

Thank you very much for your reply.

[rcporto]

To use FT you will need a lot of requirements, that include supported CPU on both hosts that share the same Fault Tolerant Compatible Set and that in general are processors from the same vendor generation. Take a look at this KB article: VMware KB: Processors and guest operating systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance

There is a tool called VMware Site Survey that will helps you check if your hosts is compatible with FT, take a look: VMware SiteSurvey Help

[Mike2015]

Hi,

Thank you very much.
I tried SiteSurvey Plugin, now i know why it doesn't work :smileyhappy:

These ESX hosts are not compatible with FT, but may contain VMs that are:

esxi02.vclass.local

CPU type Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4150 CPU @ 3.50GHz is not supported by FT.

[Cato Grace]

If you can use it, the CPU requirements for FT in vSphere 6 are greatly reduced (basically vMotion compatible), plus you are able to protect multi-vCPU VMs (up to 4 vCPU).