VMware HA, VM-Host Affinity Rules, and how they apply with Metrocluster

Duncan Epping of VMware and Yellow-Bricks has posted a nice write up on running VMware on a NetApp MetroCluster with VM-Host Affinity Rules (new in vSphere 4.1). In summary this new capability allows one to restrict the boundaries of HA capabilities to a limited number of ESX/ESXi hosts within a HA cluster for a set of VMs.

As you may imagine, this works very well when your cluster is stretched across two data centers which are 100 kms apart.

For more details, I’d suggest you check out Duncan’s article over at Yellow-Bricks.

If you need more of a primer on VM-Host Affinity, I’d suggest you hit Frank Denneman‘s blog as he has a crafted a great post on this technology which some may find useful to read prior to heading over to Yellow-Bricks.

If you are looking for more information on running vSphere on a MetroCluster, please see TR-3788 written by Larry Touchette.

Thanks VCDX007 & VCDX029 for sharing this info!