Objective 8.2: Perform Basic Troubleshooting for VMware FT and Third-Party Clusters

Three options exist to provide a highly available infrastructure for the VMs and their applications. These options are:

• VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)
• Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS)
• VMware HA

Unlike VMware HA, which restarts a VM if the ESX host fails or if the VM operating system fails, VMware FT provides full fault tolerance with no data loss, allowing the VM to continue to run. Troubleshooting FT and Microsoft clusters is the focus of this section.

The topics covered in this objective include:

• Analyze and evaluate the VM population for Maintenance mode considerations
• Understand manual third-party failover/failback processes
• Troubleshoot fault tolerance partial or unexpected failovers