🔷 vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) – Detailed Explanation In VMware vSphere , Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability for virtual machines by eliminating downtime during host failures. Unlike HA (which restarts VMs after failure), FT ensures zero downtime and zero data loss . 🔹 1️⃣ What is vSphere FT? vSphere FT creates: Primary VM (Active) Secondary VM (Shadow copy) Both run simultaneously on different ESXi hosts . If the primary host fails: ✔ Secondary VM immediately becomes active ✔ No reboot ✔ No service interruption ✔ No transaction loss This is called Continuous Availability . 🔹 2️⃣ How FT Works (Architecture) Components Involved: ESXi Hosts (minimum 2) Shared Storage (SAN / vSAN / NFS) vMotion network FT Logging network (very important) vCenter Server Process Flow: VM powered ON FT enabled vSphere creates a secondary VM CPU & memory execution state is mirrored in real time All instructions are log...
🔷 VMware vSphere – Affinity, Anti-Affinity Rules & Admission Control (Detailed Explanation) These features are critical in enterprise cluster design to ensure availability, compliance, performance, and predictable failover capacity . 🔹 1️⃣ Affinity & Anti-Affinity Rules (DRS Rules) These are DRS cluster rules that control how VMs are placed across ESXi hosts. They ensure workload placement aligns with business, licensing, and availability requirements. ✅ A. VM–VM Affinity Rules 🔹 What It Does: Forces selected VMs to run together on the same host . 📌 Use Cases: Multi-tier applications needing low latency (App + Middleware) Application server tightly coupled with backend Licensing tied to single host execution 🧠 Example: Web Server + App Server must stay on same host for performance. DRS ensures: ✔ Both VMs move together during migration ✔ They restart together after HA failover ❌ B. VM–VM Anti-Affinity Rules 🔹 What It Does: Forces sele...