Its been 3 years since VMCP has been released, what is it and how to configure it the right way?
Under the vSphere High availability feature, we now have VMCP (VM Component Protection). It provides enhanced protection from All Paths Down (APD) and Permanent Device Loss (PDL) conditions for block and file storage.
VMCP detects APD and PDL conditions and efficiently remediates the situations by restarting the Virtual Machines on fully functional ESXi hosts when compared to its predecessor. If this is enabled vSphere HA can detect datastore accessibility failures and provide automated recovery for affected virtual machines.
How to configure VMCP
On your vSphere client goto configure tab and click vSphere availability -> click on Edit
On Failures and Responses section select Datastore with PDL or Datastore with APD.
The storage protection levels you can choose and the virtual machine remediation
actions available differ depending on the type of database accessibility failure.
PDL Failures Under Datastore with PDL, you can select Issue events or Power off and
restart VMs.
APD Failures The response to APD events is more complex and accordingly the
configuration is more fine-grained. You can select Issue events, Power off
and restart VMs–conservative restart policy, or Power off and restart
VMs–aggressive restart policy
Workflow:
Recovery Timeline:
There are different responses that you can set:
- Power off and restart VMs (conservative)
- Power off and restart VMs (aggressive)
Conservative and Aggressive refers to the reaction of HA being able to restart VMs. When set to “conservative” HA will only kill the VM that is impacted by the APD if it knows another host can restart it. In the case of “aggressive” HA will always kill the VM even if it doesn’t know the state of the other hosts, which could lead to a situation where your VM is not restarted as there is no host that has access to the datastore the VM is located on.