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Friday, July 15, 2011

Virtual Machine Heartbeat in A Cluster Hyper-V Host

 

A lot of people did not realise about VM Heartbeat and did not configure Hyper-V Cluster to up to their potential. If configure properly, you will realise  it’s potential to provide high availability solution for Virtual Machine.

a) When planned downtime, we execute live migration.

b) When unplanned downtime, Hyper-V Host will perform restart of Virtual Machine.

c) When VM offline/save state, we can perform quick migration.

How about VM system hang , unresponsive, blue screen, etc?

This is the trick. In order to allow Hyper-V host automatically restart the cluster virtual machine or fail it over, you must enable Heartbeat monitoring for the Virtual Machine. To achieve this result, you need to select the VM | right click Properties | Setting | Tick Enable heartbeat monitoring for the virtual machine.

When this option is selected, heartbeats are sent from the operating system running in the virtual machine to the operating system running the Hyper-V role. If the heartbeats stop, indicating that virtual machine has become unresponsive, the cluster is notified, and can attempt to restart the clustered virtual machine or fail it over.

image

By default- It is uncheck.

So start the heartbeat monitoring on your Cluster Virtual Machine.

“Virtual Lai”