vCenter 6.5 - High Availablity Basic configuration

VMware has introduced the vCenter High Availability feature from 6.5 on wards to minimize the significant down time of the vCenter during the Host hardware failure and the patching or any related maintenance.

Basically, it has two configuration options:

Basic
Advanced

Here we are discussing only the “Basic” configuration of the High Availability feature

There are few special requirements to enable this feature in the vCenter

This feature only comes with the vCenter 6.5
vCenter deployment size should be at least small therefore 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM required
A minimum of 3 Hosts required
Hosts should be at least ESXi 5.5
Management network should be configured with a static IP and FQDN should be reachable
SSH should be enabled on the appliance
Separate Portgroup for the HA network is required
HA network must be a different subnet from the management subnet
Net work latency between the hosts must be less than 10ms
This feature is available with embedded and separate PSC deployment

You can read performance and best practices from this article

Select the configuration option as “Basic” and click “Next” to continue

Configure HA adapter IP addresses and select the dedicated port group for the HA Network by clicking the “Browse” button. Once you select it click “Next” to continue

Provide the Passive and Witness node IPs for the deployment

Click on “Advanced” button to Override the Management network upon the failure and specify the Separate DNS servers

At the next step you can see the placement of the Nodes and there can be compatibility Warnings check the warnings

Most of the Warnings are due to the Datastores, all these Nodes are sitting in the same datastore by default and you can change them by clicking the “Edit” option. In my case I don’t have that much of storage and that was trowing the Warnings.