Enabling vSphere HA on a cluster

The fundamental principle of HA is to be able to recover virtual machines from a host that has failed to another. That implies that other hosts in the cluster are capable of providing compute, storage, and network identity for the virtual machine similar to the failed host.

vSphere HA is not enabled by default on a host cluster. It has to be manually enabled. In this recipe, we will understand the requirements of a HA cluster, how it is enabled, and how it works.

Getting ready

Although the actual process of enabling HA is as simple as a click of the checkbox, in order to successfully host the VMs from a failed host, the following prerequisites need to be met:

1. All hosts must be licensed for vSphere HA.
2. All hosts should access the same shared storage, that is, access to the datastore containing the virtual machine files.
3. All hosts should have access to the same virtual machine networks.
4. All hosts should be configured to have a common Management Network.
5. Sufficient...