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Vsphere HA Admission Control

vSphere HA uses admission control to ensure sufficient resources are available for virtual machine recovery when a host fails. There are three types of admission control: host, resource pool, and vSphere HA admission control. vSphere HA admission control can be disabled temporarily for testing or maintenance, but is otherwise recommended to be kept enabled to guarantee virtual machines can be failed over if a host fails.

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77 views4 pages

Vsphere HA Admission Control

vSphere HA uses admission control to ensure sufficient resources are available for virtual machine recovery when a host fails. There are three types of admission control: host, resource pool, and vSphere HA admission control. vSphere HA admission control can be disabled temporarily for testing or maintenance, but is otherwise recommended to be kept enabled to guarantee virtual machines can be failed over if a host fails.

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mani
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vSphere HA Admission Control

vSphere HA uses admission control to ensure that sufficient resources are reserved for virtual
machine recovery when a host fails.

Admission control imposes constraints on resource usage. Any action that might violate these
constraints is not permitted. Actions that might be disallowed include the following examples:

 Powering on a virtual machine


 Migrating a virtual machine
 Increasing the CPU or memory reservation of a virtual machine

The basis for vSphere HA admission control is how many host failures your cluster is allowed to
tolerate and still guarantee failover. The host failover capacity can be set in three ways:

 Cluster resource percentage


 Slot policy
 Dedicated failover hosts

Note:

vSphere HA admission control can be disabled. However, without it you have no assurance that
the expected number of virtual machines can be restarted after a failure. Do not permanently
disable admission control.

Regardless of the admission control option chosen, a VM resource reduction threshold also
exists. You use this setting to specify the percentage of resource degradation to tolerate, but it
is not available unless vSphere DRS is enabled.

The resource reduction calculation is checked for both CPU and memory. It considers a virtual
machine's reserved memory and memory overload to decide whether to permit it to power on,
migrate, or have reservation changes. The actual memory consumed by the virtual machine is
not considered in the calculation because the memory reservation does not always correlate
with the actual memory usage of the virtual machine. If the actual usage is more than reserved
memory, insufficient failover capacity is available, resulting in performance degradation on
failover.

Setting a performance reduction threshold enables you to specify the occurrence of a


configuration issue. For example:

 The default value is 100%, which produces no warnings.


 If you reduce the threshold to 0%, a warning is generated when cluster usage exceeds
the available capacity.
 If you reduce the threshold to 20%, the performance reduction that can be tolerated is
calculated as performance reduction = current utilization * 20%. When the current
usage minus the performance reduction exceeds the available capacity, a configuration
notice is issued.

 Cluster Resources Percentage Admission Control

You can configure vSphere HA to perform admission control by reserving a specific


percentage of cluster CPU and memory resources for recovery from host failures. [Read
more]
 Slot Policy Admission Control

With the slot policy option, vSphere HA admission control ensures that a specified
number of hosts can fail and sufficient resources remain in the cluster to fail over all the
virtual machines from those hosts. [Read more]
 Dedicated Failover Hosts Admission Control

You can configure vSphere HA to designate specific hosts as the failover hosts. [Read
more]
vSphere HA Admission Control

vCenter Server uses admission control to ensure that sufficient resources are available in a
cluster to provide failover protection and to ensure that virtual machine resource reservations
are respected.

Three types of admission control are available.

Host Ensures that a host has sufficient resources to satisfy the reservations of all virtual
machines running on it.
Resource Ensures that a resource pool has sufficient resources to satisfy the reservations,
Pool shares, and limits of all virtual machines associated with it.
vSphere HA Ensures that sufficient resources in the cluster are reserved for virtual machine
recovery in the event of host failure.

Admission control imposes constraints on resource usage and any action that would violate
these constraints is not permitted. Examples of actions that could be disallowed include the
following:

■Powering on a virtual machine.


■Migrating a virtual machine onto a host or into a cluster or resource pool.
■Increasing the CPU or memory reservation of a virtual machine.

Of the three types of admission control, only vSphere HA admission control can be disabled.
However, without it there is no assurance that the expected number of virtual machines can be
restarted after a failure. VMware recommends that you do not disable admission control, but
you might need to do so temporarily, for the following reasons:

If you need to violate the failover constraints when there are not enough resources to support
them--for example, if you are placing hosts in standby mode to test them for use with
■Distributed Power Management (DPM).
■If an automated process needs to take actions that might temporarily violate the failover
constraints (for example, as part of an upgrade directed by vSphere Update Manager).
■If you need to perform testing or maintenance operations.
Note

When vSphere HA admission control is disabled, vSphere HA ensures that there are at least two
powered-on hosts in the cluster even if DPM is enabled and can consolidate all virtual machines
onto a single host. This is to ensure that failover is possible.

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