Turn On Fault Tolerance Option Is Disabled: Symptoms

Turn on Fault Tolerance option is disabled
Symptoms
A virtual machine's Turn on Fault Tolerance option is greyed out
A virtual machine's Turn on Fault Tolerance option is disabled
You cannot turn on Fault Tolerance
Resolution
For the Turn on Fault Tolerance option to be visible, these requirements must be met. If any of the
following is not configured correctly, the option is not displayed. Ensure each of the following are properly
configured:
1. Ensure VMware software compatibility. All versions of the VMware software used in a Fault
Tolerance environment must be compatible. Ensure that the versions installed at your site are
listed as compatible in the vSphere Compatibility Matrix.
2. On a hardware and guest operating system level, only certain processors and operating systems
are supported. For more information on this support, see Processors and Guest Operating
Systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance (1008027).
Note: SMP (Multiprocessor) virtual machines are not supported with VMware Fault Tolerance at
this time.
3. Hardware Virtualization (HV) must be enabled in the BIOS for each host in the cluster. The
process for enabling HV differs in each BIOS. For this reason, contact your hardware vendor for
instructions on enabling HV.
4. All ESX hosts used by VMware Fault Tolerance must be members of a VMware High Availability
(HA) cluster. VMware HA must be enabled for VMware Fault Tolerance to function. Instructions
for enabling VMware HA can be found in the vSphere Availability Guide.
5. The ESX hosts that run the primary and secondary Fault Tolerance nodes must be running the
same build of ESX. Additionally, patches have been released that contain improvements to the
VMware Fault Tolerance features. For this reason, VMware strongly suggests updating to the
most current version available. Instructions for updating hosts can be found in the VMware
vCenter Update Manager Administration Guide or the ESX 4 Patch Management Guide.
6. There are several important considerations relative to storage for VMware Fault Tolerance.
Ensure each of the following are configured for your environment to enable VMware Fault
Tolerance:
7.
o The virtual machine must reside on shared storage. This is storage that is visible to all
ESX hosts in the cluster.
o Storage must be FC SAN, iSCSI or NFS, but not local storage.

o Virtual RDMs are supported, but Physical RDMs are not.
o Virtual Disk files must be Thick Provisioned. For more information, see Turning on, or
enabling Fault Tolerance for a powered on virtual machine with lazyzeroed disks fails
(1009866).
o Virtual machines cannot have snapshots. If there are snapshots, these must be
committed before proceeding.
8. Networking must be configured properly to ensure proper VMware Fault Tolerance functionality.
Ensure each of the following is defined appropriately:
9.
o A separate VMkernel port group must be defined for Fault Tolerance logging. Instructions
for creating this portgroup can be found in the Networking chapter of the ESX
Configuration Guide.
o Fault Tolerance logging and VMotion portgroups must be defined and assigned a
physical network card for uplink. This network card must be at least 1Gb, with a 10Gb
card preferred.
o Enable use of Jumbo Frames for the Fault Tolerance logging. For detailed steps, see the
Advanced Networking section of the ESX Configuration Guide.
o VMware recommends enabling fully redundant NICs to ensure availability, though Fault
Tolerance can function without it.
o In environments with constrained bandwidth, network utilization can be lowered by

following the instructions in Reducing FT logging traffic for disk read intensive workloads
(1011965).
o For virtual machines hosted on ESX 4 and ESX 4 Update 1, vmxnet3 is not a supported
NIC if you want to enable Fault Tolerance. All other types of NICs are supported (for
example, flexible, vmxnet2 and e1000). For more information, see Enabling Fault
Tolerance on a virtual machine configured with a vmxnet3 vNIC fails (1013757).
For more information about VMware Fault Tolerance, refer to the article: VMware Fault Tolerance FAQ
(1013428).

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Turn On Fault Tolerance Option Is Disabled: Symptoms

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Turn on Fault Tolerance option is disabled

A virtual machine's Turn on Fault Tolerance option is greyed out

A virtual machine's Turn on Fault Tolerance option is disabled

You cannot turn on Fault Tolerance

o Storage must be FC SAN, iSCSI or NFS, but not local storage.

o In environments with constrained bandwidth, network utilization can be lowered by

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