Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Using VMware Fault Tolerance to Protect a Virtualized vCenter machine
Posted by on November 30, 2009
In my lab I have a virtualized vCenter installation, it works well and I’ve had no problems with this configuration in the last year.
I wanted to try to build a 2 node demo cluster for my VMUG session and needed vCenter to be protected by FT – so an individual host failure would not break vCenter during my demos.
My vCenter installation was thin-provisioned which isn’t compatible with FT so the quickest solution I found to this was to just clone it to a new VM with a fully provisioned (thick) disk.
Once completed I powered up the cloned vCenter installation whilst quickly switching off the old one to avoid any IP conflicts this worked fine and the ESX hosts didn’t really notice, I just had to re-connect my vSphere client.
I then enabled the FT features and after doing its thing I have a fully protected ESX/vCenter installation using FT.
it’s worth noting that you can only enable FT when using a vSphere client connected to vCenter – you can’t enable it if you connect directly to the ESX host itself (which is why cloning was the easiest approach for me)
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 
Great setup for demos and test/dev. However, keep in mind that the required / recommended number of cpu’s in vCenter is 2. 2 vCPU’s are not supported on a FT-enabled VM.