Objective 6.4 – Configure and Manage Edge Services High Availability

Knowledge

• Describe NSX Edge High Availability
  • High Availability (HA) ensures that an NSX Edge appliance is always available by installing an active pair of Edges on your virtualized infrastructure. You can enable HA either when installing NSX Edge or on an installed NSX Edge instance.
  • The primary NSX Edge appliance is in the active state and the secondary appliance is in the standby state. NSX Edge replicates the configuration of the primary appliance for the standby appliance or you can manually add two appliances.
• Explain Edge High Availability best practices
  • VMware recommends that you create the primary and secondary appliances on separate resource pools and datastores. If you create the primary and secondary appliances on the same datastore, the datastore must be shared across all hosts in the cluster for the HA appliance pair to be deployed on different ESX hosts.
    • This seems to conflict with the statement “Two virtual machines are deployed on vCenter in the same resource pool and datastore as the appliance you configured”
      
• Describe service availability during an Edge High Availability failover
  • If a heartbeat is not received from the primary appliance within the specified time (default value is 15 seconds), the primary appliance is declared dead. The standby appliance moves to the active state, takes over the interface configuration of the primary appliance, and starts the NSX Edge services that were running on the primary appliance. When the switch over takes place, a system event is displayed in the System Events tab of Settings & Reports. Load Balancer and VPN services need to re-establish TCP connection with NSX Edge, so service is disrupted for a short while. Virtual wire connections and firewall sessions are synched between the primary and standby appliances, so there is no service disruption during switch over.
• Differentiate NSX Edge High Availability and vSphere High Availability
  • NSX Edge High Availability is stateful, and uses 2 running VMs. In the event of failure of the host server where the Primary VM is running, the Secondary VM takes over the service.
  • vSphere High Availability monitors for a host failure and restarts any lost VMs on other hosts in the cluster. This is used to restart the original Primary VM in the event of a host failure, so that an NSX Edge HA pair still remains in the event of a further failure.
• Configure NSX Edge High Availability
  • Configure heartbeat settings
    • Log in to the vSphere Web Client.
    • Click Networking & Security and then click NSX Edges.
    • Double-click an NSX Edge.
    • Click the Manage tab and then click the Settings tab.
    • In the HA Configuration panel, click Change.
    • In the Change HA Configuration dialog box, enter the “Declare Dead Time” The default is 15 seconds.
    • Click OK.
  • Configure management IP addresses
    • Log in to the vSphere Web Client.
    • Click Networking & Security and then click NSX Edges.
    • Double-click an NSX Edge.
    • Click the Manage tab and then click the Settings tab.
    • In the HA Configuration panel, click Change.
    • In the Change HA Configuration dialog box, choose the appropriate vNIC, and enter the Management IPs
    • Click OK.
• Modify an existing Edge High Availability deployment
  • Log in to the vSphere Web Client.
  • Click Networking & Security and then click NSX Edges.
  • Double-click an NSX Edge.
  • Click the Manage tab and then click the Settings tab.
  • In the HA Configuration panel, click Change.
  • In the Change HA Configuration dialog box, make changes as appropriate.
  • Click OK.
• Determine resource pool requirements for a given Edge High Availability configuration
  • For high availability, verify that the resource pool has enough capacity for both HA virtual machines to be deployed.

Tools

• NSX Administration Guide
• NSX Manager

vSphere Web Client