You can monitor your cluster for HA related issues by setting up alarms. The are a number of default alarms, including these cluster alarms:
- Cannot find master – Default alarm to alert when vCenter Server has been unable to connect to a vSphere HA master agent for a prolonged period
- Insufficient failover resources – Default alarm to alert when there are insufficient cluster resources for vSphere HA to guarantee failover
- Failover in progress – Default alarm to alert when vSphere HA is in the process of failing over virtual machines
There are also these virtual machine alarms:
- VM monitoring error – Default alarm to alert when vSphere HA failed to reset a virtual machine
- VM monitoring action – Default alarm to alert when vSphere HA reset a virtual machine
- Failover failed – Default alarm to alert when vSphere HA failed to failover a virtual machine
And there is the following host related alarm:
- HA status – Default alarm to monitor health of a host as reported by vSphere HA
To configure these default alarms, using the vSphere client, highlight the vCenter server object, then click onto the Alarms tab:
As with other alarms, you can configure it so a notification email or snmp trap is sent if the alarm is triggered, or you can have it take one of these other actions:
- Run a command
- Power on VM
- Power off VM
- Suspend VM
- Reset VM
- Migrate VM
- Reboot Guest VM
- Shutdown Guest VM
Sending Notification Emails and SNMP Traps
Remember that if you are choosing the send notification emails or SNMP traps then you need to configure the appropriate vCenter server settings. For email:
And for SNMP:
Monitoring a HA Cluster
Along with the alarms you can configure, there are a few other ways in which you can monitor your cluster. The cluster summary tab has a lot of information regarding the health of the cluster:
The ‘Cluster Status’ link will show any current issues with the cluster’s hosts, it will show how many VMs are protected by HA and will show which hosts are using which datastores for their datastore heartbeating:
The ‘Configuration Issues’ link will display any current configuration issues with the cluster:
