Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, vSphere FT has the following requirements on any VM that is to be protected using
vSphere FT:
Only VMs with a single vCPU are supported with vSphere FT. VMs with more than one
vCPU are not compatible with vSphere FT.
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VMs must be running a supported guest OS.
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VM i les must be stored on shared storage that is accessible to all applicable ESXi hosts.
vSphere FT supports Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, and NFS for shared storage.
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A VM's virtual disks must be in thick provisioned (eagerzeroedthick) format or a Virtual
mode RDM. Physical mode RDMs are not supported.
The VM must not have any snapshots. You must remove or commit snapshots before you
can enable vSphere FT for a VM.
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The VM must not be a linked clone.
The VM cannot have any USB devices, sound devices, serial ports, or parallel ports in its
coni guration. Remove these items from the VM coni guration before attempting to enable
vSphere FT.
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The VM can not use N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV).
Nested page tables/extended page tables (NPT/EPT) are not supported. vSphere FT will
disable NPTs/EPTs on VMs for which vSphere FT is enabled.
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The VM cannot use NIC passthrough or the older vlance network drivers. Turn off NIC
passthrough and update the networking drivers to vmxnet2, vmxnet3, or E1000.
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The VM can not have CD-ROM or l oppy devices backed by a physical or remote device.
You'll need to discon nect these devices or coni gure them to point to an ISO or FLP image
on a shared datastore.
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The VM cannot use a paravirtualized kernel. Turn off paravirtualization in order to use
vSphere FT.
As you can see, vSphere FT has some fairly stringent requirements in order to be properly
supported.
vSphere FT also introduces some operational changes that must be taken into account as well:
It is recommended that power management (also known as
power
capping
) be turned off in
the BIOS of any ESXi host that will participate in vSphere FT. This helps ensure uniformity
in the CPU speeds of the ESXi hosts in the cluster.
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While you can use vMotion with a vSphere FT-protected VM, you cannot use Storage vMo-
tion. By extension, this means that vSphere FT-protected VMs cannot take advantage of
Storage DRS. To use Storage vMotion, you must i rst turn off vSphere FT.
Hot-plugging devices is not supported, so you cannot make any virtual hardware changes
when a vSphere FT-protected VM is powered on.
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