Protecting the CTERA Portal Main Database using vSphere HA

The CTERA Portal platform must be protected from datacenter and virtualization host failure and maintain data integrity and business continuity. This can be achieved through CTERA Portal’s native, application level, database archiving and replication procedures but can also be managed at the ESXi layer.

To protect the CTERA Portal platform from datacenter and virtualization host failure at the ESXi layer:

• vSphere HA Hardware and Software Requirements
• Configuring vSphere HA
• Testing vSphere HA Failover

vSphere HA Hardware and Software Requirements

Before starting to configure vSphere HA and protect the CTERA Main Database VM, review VMware’s vSphere HA Hardware and Software requirements. These requirements must be addressed prior to any configuration and VM deployments.

Configuring vSphere HA

Perform the following procedure to enable vSphere HA for your datacenter.

To configure vSphere HA:

1. Login in to your vCenter Server using vSphere client.
2. Right-click on the cluster you want to protect using vSphere HA on and click Settings.
3. Browse to vSphere Availability under Services.
4. Click EDIT for vSphere HA.
   The Edit Cluster Settings window is displayed.
5. Enable vSphere HA.
6. In the Failures and responses tab make sure that Enable Host Monitoring is on and set Host Failure Response to Restart VMs. 
7. In the Heartbeat Datastores tab, select the shared datastores that will be used for vSphere HA.
   Note: You must select a minimum of two datastores. For automatic detection of accessible datastores, choose Automatically select datastores accessible from the hosts.
8. Click OK.

vSphere HA is now enabled on the cluster.

Once vSphere HA is enabled, using the dedicated, shared datastores, virtual machines deployed to hosts participating in your cluster are automatically protected.

Testing vSphere HA Failover

Virtual machines deployed to hosts participating in the vSphere HA-enabled cluster are protected.

To perform a failover test:

1. Deploy the CTERA Portal Main Database VM to one of the hosts is the cluster with vSphere HA set.
2. Upload sample data to the CTERA Global File System through CTERA Portal’s web application or via SMB using a CTERA Edge Filer.
3. After successfully uploading files to the CTERA Global File System, power off the vSphere host running the CTERA Portal Main Database.

vSphere will provide an alert indicating that the failover process has started and will begin restarting the CTERA Portal Main Database VM on a second host. 

Upon completing the failover, vSphere will provide an alert indicating that the CTERA Portal Main Database virtual machine is back up and running.

The failover and failback processes are performed automatically, requiring no manual intervention.