Using VMware vSphere High Availability with Storage Gateway

Storage Gateway provides high availability on VMware through a set of application-level health checks integrated with VMware vSphere High Availability (VMware HA). This approach helps protect storage workloads against hardware, hypervisor, or network failures. It also helps protect against software errors, such as connection timeouts and file share or volume unavailability.

With this integration, a gateway deployed in a VMware environment on-premises or in a VMware Cloud on AWS automatically recovers from most service interruptions. It generally does this in under 60 seconds with no data loss.

Note

We recommend doing the following things if you deploy Storage Gateway in a VMware HA cluster:

• Deploy the VMware ESX .ova downloadable package that contains the Storage Gateway VM on only one host in a cluster.

• When deploying the .ova package, select a data store that is not local to one host. Instead, use a data store that is accessible to all hosts in the cluster. If you select a data store that is local to a host and the host fails, then the data source might not be accessible to other hosts in the cluster and failover to another host might not succeed.

• With clustering, if you deploy the .ova package to the cluster, select a host when you are prompted to do so. Alternately, you can deploy directly to a host in a cluster.

The following topics describe how to deploy Storage Gateway in a VMware HA cluster:

Configure Your vSphere VMware HA Cluster

First, if you haven’t already created a VMware cluster, create one. For information about how to create a VMware cluster, see Create a vSphere HA Cluster in the VMware documentation.

Next, configure your VMware cluster to work with Storage Gateway.

To configure your VMware cluster

1. On the Edit Cluster Settings page in VMware vSphere, make sure that VM monitoring is configured for VM and application monitoring. To do so, set the following values for each option:

   • Host Failure Response: Restart VMs

   • Response for Host Isolation: Shut down and restart VMs

   • Datastore with PDL: Disabled

   • Datastore with APD: Disabled

   • VM Monitoring: VM and Application Monitoring

2. Fine-tune the sensitivity of the cluster by adjusting the following values:

   • Failure interval – After this interval, the VM is restarted if a VM heartbeat isn't received.

   • Minimum uptime – The cluster waits this long after a VM starts to begin monitoring for VM tools' heartbeats.

   • Maximum per-VM resets – The cluster restarts the VM a maximum of this many times within the maximum resets time window.

   • Maximum resets time window – The window of time in which to count the maximum resets per-VM resets.

   If you aren't sure what values to set, use these example settings:

   • Failure interval: 30 seconds

   • Minimum uptime: 120 seconds

   • Maximum per-VM resets: 3

   • Maximum resets time window: 1 hour

If you have other VMs running on the cluster, you might want to set these values specifically for your VM. You can't do this until you deploy the VM from the .ova. For more information on setting these values, see (Optional) Add Override Options for Other VMs on Your Cluster.

Set Up Your Gateway Type

Use the following procedure to set up the gateway

To download the .ova image for your gateway type

• Download the .ova image for your gateway type from one of the following:

  • File Gateway – Create and activate an Amazon S3 File Gateway

Deploy the Gateway

In your configured cluster, deploy the .ova image to one of the cluster's hosts. For instructions, see Deploy an OVF or OVA Template in the VMware vSphere online documentation.

To deploy the gateway .ova image

1. Deploy the .ova image to one of the hosts in the cluster.

2. Make sure the data stores that you choose for the root disk and the cache are available to all hosts in the cluster.

(Optional) Add Override Options for Other VMs on Your Cluster

If you have other VMs running on your cluster, you might want to set the cluster values specifically for each VM. For instructions, see Customize an Individual Virtual Machine in the VMware vSphere online documentation.

To add override options for other VMs on your cluster

1. On the Summary page in VMware vSphere, choose your cluster to open the cluster page, and then choose Configure.

2. Choose the Configuration tab, and then choose VM Overrides.

3. Add a new VM override option to change each value.

   Set the following values for each option under vSphere HA - VM Monitoring:

   • VM Monitoring: Override Enabled - VM and Application Monitoring

   • VM monitoring sensitivity: Override Enabled - VM and Application Monitoring

   • VM Monitoring: Custom

   • Failure interval: 30 seconds

   • Minimum uptime: 120 seconds

   • Maximum per-VM resets: 5

   • Maximum resets time window: Within 1 hrs

Activate Your Gateway

After the .ova is deployed in your VMware environment, activate your gateway using the Storage Gateway console. For instructions, see Review settings and activate your Amazon S3 File Gateway.

Test Your VMware High Availability Configuration

After you activate your gateway, test your configuration.

To test your VMware HA configuration

1. Open the Storage Gateway console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/home.

2. On the navigation pane, choose Gateways, and then choose the gateway that you want to test for VMware HA.

3. For Actions, choose Verify VMware HA.

4. In the Verify VMware High Availability Configuration box that appears, choose OK.

   Note

   Testing your VMware HA configuration reboots your gateway VM and interrupts connectivity to your gateway. The test might take a few minutes to complete.

   If the test is successful, the status of Verified appears in the details tab of the gateway in the console.

5. Choose Exit.

You can find information about VMware HA events in the Amazon CloudWatch log groups. For more information, see Getting S3 File Gateway health logs with CloudWatch log groups.