vSphere FT requirements

vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) has the requirements and limitations at the cluster, host, and virtual machine levels. Here is a list of all these requirements:

vSphere FT cluster requirements

  • the ESXi hosts in the cluster must have access to the same datastores and networks.
  • a minimum of two FT-certified ESXi hosts with the same FT version or host build number must be used.
  • the ESXi hosts must have FT logging and vMotion networking configured.
  • vSphere HA must be enabled on the cluster.
  • host certificate checking must be enabled in the vCenter Server settings. This is the default for vCenter Server 4.1 and later.

vSphere FT host requirements

  • the hosts must have processors from an FT-compatible processor group.
  • the hosts must be licensed for Fault Tolerance.
  • the configuration for each host must have Hardware Virtualization (HV) enabled in the BIOS.
  • the hosts must be certified for FT in the VMware HCL.

vSphere FT virtual machine requirements

  • only VMs with a single vCPU are supported with vSphere FT.
  • the VMs must be running a supported guest OS.
  • the VM files must be stored on shared storage that is accessible to all applicable ESXi hosts. Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, and NFS for shared storage are supported by FT.
  • the VM’s virtual disks must be in thick provisioned format or a Virtual mode RDM. Physical mode RDMs are not supported.
  • the VM must not have any snapshots.
  • the VM must not be a linked clone.
  • the VM cannot have any USB devices, sound devices, serial ports, or parallel ports in its configuration.
  • vSphere Fault Tolerance is not supported with a 2TB+ VMDK.

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