And finally some real action of the new amazing vSphere's Fault Tolerance. In this video we'll do the following in order:

• Verify that the FT logging is enabled on our network card.
• Enable the FT on one VM.
• Observe that the VM has two instances, the primary running on one ESX server, and the secondary running on a deferent ESX server.
• Demonstrate the "Record & Play", or to be acurate the "vLockStep" mechanism used on the FT enabled VM.
• Start a large file copy to the VM as a continuous operation in place throughout our fail-over process
• Start the fail-over process by resetting the ESX blade via the Dell admin console.
• Observe that the VM has been shifted to the secondary ESX server, and that the file copy is not interrupted.
• Observe that the FT has automatically chosen another ESX server to protect the VM with no intervention from our side.
• We'll check also the up-time of the VM after the fail over.
• And finally we'll perform the migration of the FT enabled VM in case of planned maintenance.

I hope you will find this video useful, and see the great benefit of the new Fault Tolerance feature in vSphere 4.

« Related posts: »

1. » vSphere 4.0 Fault Tolerance (Architecture Diagram, Video and Use Cases)
2. » Video: vSphere4 Unleashed: 03 – Licensing & Configuring vCenter
3. » The Fault-Tolerance and Zero-Downtime becoming the new standards for High-Availability!
4. » Video: vSphere4 Unleashed: 01 – Installing ESX4.0
5. » Video: vSphere4 Unleashed: 06 – Storage vMotion