vSphere 4 - Fault Tolernace

[snootalope]

Looking at upgrading from 3.5 u4 to vSphere 4 here soon.

I'm wondering if there's anyone using the fault tolerance feature in the new version. I understand how it works, my question is does the secondary vm create a whole set of files from the original vm? So say I enable FT for a vm that has 200GB of disks configured, is it going to create a whole new set of 200GB for the backup/FT vm? So I'd actually need twice the space of a single vm for FT to work?

Thanks!

 

[egodette]

No.. It just duplicates the part of the vm in memory on two different hosts. So if one host goes down the other takes over. Both hosts still point to the same directory where the vm files live.

It does double the amount of memory and CPU needed for a VM so you want to only FT the critical systems. (Unless you have lots of resources)