New Training: VM Fault Tolerance and Admission Control

In this 9-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Keith Barker describes and demonstrates the use of Fault Tolerance for a critical VM and how admission control can improve uptime in a vSphere environment. Watch this new VMware training.

Watch the full course: VMware Certified Professional

This training includes:

• 9 videos

• 1.1 hours of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Intro to VM Fault Tolerance

• Fault Tolerance Overview

• Preparing Networking for FT

• Admission Control

• Configuring FT

• Verifying FT

• Enhanced vMotion Compatibility

• Hands on Lab: VM FT

• VM FT Lab Walkthrough

What is Fault Tolerance for vSphere?

vSphere is an amazing virtualization technology. It's trusted by large and small businesses alike. Most IT professionals regard vSphere as being the best virtualization solution on the market. It's no secret why. vSphere has the best performance for virtual machines as well as features. One of those features is fault tolerance.

Fault tolerance is different from what you might consider high availability for virtual machines. High availability is more so designed to always ensure that a virtual machine can respond and process as fast as resources allow with as little downtime as possible. Fault tolerance has a different goal.

The goal of fault tolerance is to remove any downtime whatsoever. This is especially important for mission-critical applications. vSphere does this by making an exact clone of a VM on a separate set of hardware. If vSphere detects hardware failure or any issues with the original VM, it automatically transfers everything to that clone immediately. Once that process is completed, a new 'clone' is created by vSphere on the fly in case another issue should occur.

Fault tolerance does have limitations, though. You'll need to understand those limitations so you can decide when and where to use it.