VMWare HA.. url based questions

[geranimo666]

Hello to all here-

Using VMWare HA (and RDS) I would like to know if IIS website VM's I've created will all for high availability across multiple url's (on more than one vm).

So for instance, I have 3 VM's all running IIS web services and users are accessing these websites url's from their pc's.. if one VM were to go down, would the user lose that url connection or because I'm using HA -will it failover to the next available VM running IIS.

thanks for any reply and/or any information at all..

geranimo

 

[Arisap]

HA covers host failures only. If an ESX host should fail, all the active sessions will be powered down as if the power plug had been yanked. HA kicks in and boots the downed VM sessions on the next available cluster node member (it turns out that 3.0.1 boots the sessions to the next alphabetically named host -- annoying but true). All the sessions are then powered up on the next host as if you plugged the cord back in. There is no stateful failover in HA. You can load balance your web app in a stateful manner. HA is high availability in case of HOST failure only.

Also beware that when HA does boot all the failed nodes sessions, it takes DRS some time to calculate the vmotion process. Therefore, the HA'd host is now running all its original sessions plus all the "recovered" sessions for a while. Watch CPU and memory usage!