Ha

While there is a reasonable amount of information about how HA works in vROps I have found there is still some confusion as to how HA actually works with vROps or rather what are the benefits and perhaps more importantly the cost for enabling the feature.

HA is a great feature and in my opinion should be considered seriously with any deployment (where possible).

Not only does HA protect your Master node (which essentially behaves as an index for your vROps cluster and if lost will render your cluster dead unless you have a working backup of your cluster) it will also allow your cluster to tolerate a data node failure. So in short what is not to like!

As promised, I am posting the recording for the 5th Session of vROps Webinar Series 2016. Both Sunny and I successfully delivered the session on Design and Deployment considerations.

Session Details:- In this instalment of the series, we discussed the steps and thought processes that should be used before and during the design and deployment of vRealize Operations Manager. During the session among other things we will cover the planning, core components, correct sizing, HA, clustering, DR and future growth**.**

One of the great new features included in vROps is High Availability, however when you look a little closer at how it works careful thought needs to go into whether you want to use it or not.

I have had several discussions with my colleagues on the subject about whether you should or should not enable it in any given deployment of a vROps cluster.

So the following are my thoughts and bullet points for you to consider when faced with same dilemma.

Providing a highly available single sign on for vRealize Automation is a fundamental part of ensuring the availability of the platform. Traditionally, (vCAC) vRA uses the Identity Appliance and relies on vSphere HA to provide the availability of the SSO platform, but in a fully distributed HA environment that’s not really good enough. It’s also possible to use the vSphere 5.5 SSO install in a HA configuration - however, many companies are making the move to the latest version of vSphere and don’t necessarily want to maintain a 5.5 HA SSO instance.

Here’s a lesson in checking the basics! I added new ESXi 5 host to a cluster today and spent a good couple of hours troubleshooting the error:

vSphere HA agent for host [Host’s Name] has an error in [Cluster’s Name] in [Datacenter’s Name]: vSphere HA agent cannot be correctly installed or configured

After a few basic checks, migrating the host in and out of the cluster and rebooting, I headed off to google and began troubleshooting.