HA or FT for server maintenance?

[BillHagen]

I'm spinning up a new print server in our VMWare / ESXi 5.5 environment.

I'd sure like to be able to take it offline for maintenance (service pack updates, microsoft updates, etc.) without keeping the entire company from being able to print.

I have HA enabled on the cluster and setup fault tolerance logging on our vmotion network. I can enable FT on a test VM.

So how to I "failover" to the secondary VM and log into the primary to do updates? I would then need to return to using the primary. And push the changes to the secondary.

Also, as an aside, I had to do all this work in the fat client. My primary and secondary vm's show up in the fat client, but not in the web client. 

Thanks!

[rcporto]

You cannot access the "secondary" VM... this is "shadow" VM can be accessed only if the "primary" fails.

To achieve the print server high availability with possibility to apply updates without stop the print services in your company, you will need create a Print Server Failover Cluster, take a look here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj556311.aspx

[BillHagen]

So while I've already looked into clustering and am not opposed to it, I guess my *real* question is: can I accomplish what I want to accomplish with VMWare VSphere 5 Enterprise Plus (we have this licence currently). Or is there another VMWare product under this license that would be able to accomplish this?

Thanks!

[rcporto]

The answer is no... you can achieve what you want only with guest clustering solution... the VMware solutions, like HA/FT can provide a better availability to your print server virtual machine, but to make maintenance on guest OS, you will need another "active" guest OS serving users, that is not the case of HA/FT.

[BillHagen]

Perfect, thanks! That answered my question.