Triggered by some feedback on the VMware reddit channel, I was wondering what is holding us back in adopting the vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) feature. Comments on Reddit stated that although the increased availability is desirable, the performance impact is holding them back to actually use it in production environments.
Use cases for FT could be, according to the vSphere 6 documentation center:
- Applications that need to be available at all times, especially those that have long-lasting client connections that users want to maintain during hardware failure.
- Custom applications that have no other way of doing clustering or other forms of application resiliency.
- Cases where high availability might be provided through custom clustering solutions, which are too complicated to configure and maintain.
However, the stated use cases only focus on availability and do not seem to incorporate a performance impact when enabling FT. Is there a sweet-spot for applications that do need high resiliency, but do not require immense performance and could coop with a latency impact due to FT? It really depends on the application workload. A SQL server typically generates more FT traffic then for instance a webserver that primarily transmits. So the impact of enabling FT will impact some workloads more then other.
Requirements
Since the introduction of vSphere 6: Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT), the requirements for FT are a bit more flexible. The compute maximums for a FT enabled VM are 4 vCPUs and 64GB memory. The use of eager zero thick disks is no longer a requirement. So thin, lazy zeroed thick and eager zero thick provisioned disks are all supported in SMP-FT!
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