vSphere 5 High Availability (HA) Configuration and Demonstration Video

Back in 2006 VMware HA was the technology that really sold me on virtualizing production workloads. I thought virtualization was a pretty neat technology that was well suited for testing and development but in a production environment it still seemed like you were putting all your eggs in one basket. A pre-sales VMware Engineer did a demo of HA by shutting down a running host to simulate a failure. Within a minute or so the VMs running on the host rebooted on another host and I have been hooked ever since. Forget about server consolidation, hardware cost savings, power and cooling savings, and such; not having to drive into the office in the middle of the night to reboot a hung server – for me at that time HA was game changing awesomeness!

Anyway I was just messing around last night with my lab trying to come up with some teaching tools for the VMware classes at TCC next semester. I came up with this screen capture video that demonstrates the configuration of VMware HA and then demonstrates a host failure. Similar to the demo that pre-sales Engineer did many years ago. For my first shot at it (the screen capture not HA configuration ;)) I think it came out OK. If you are going to view it full screen it looks best if you change the settings to 720p.

I may work on adding narration at some point but for now I figure I can just narrate it in class. Anyone know how to force the video to be 720p when it is embeded??? I plan do several more videos to demonstrate some other VMware technologies for the TCC VMware classes.

This also demonstrates what you can do in a VMware Workstation lab. The ESXi hosts and vCenter are running in Workstation 8. The VMs are running nested on ESXi host. Virtual virtual!!!

Would like to hear what others think and would appreciate any tips on creating these type of videos. Just leave me a comment.

TGIF!!! Have a great weekend!!!