Kickstart and FT logging

One of the great features of vSphere is the option to make your vm's fault tolerant.
For those who are not yet aware of what this function does, just a short description.

Under normal conditions, your vm will run on 1 physical esx host. You can move it to another physical host by using vmotion if you use shared storage.

With Fault Tolerance, your vm will run simultaneously on 2 physical hosts, again using shared storage.
Your primary vm will be the one that's accessed all the time, the secondary vm will take over in case of physical problems with the esx host where the primary vm is situated.
As the secondary vm is synched (vlockstep) all the time, your vm is not protected against guest crashes. If your guest OS fails on the primary host, your secondary vm will fail too! As said before, you require shared storage, your secondary vm will use the same vmdk files!
And the saga continues, once your secondary vm becomes primary, a new secondary will be created on another esx in the same cluster (if a host is available).
For more details, just read the following pdf of vmware, as you have some requirements.

As certain commands where removed or not yet known to script the installation using kickstart, it was hard to find out how to enable the FT logging. Using the VI client you can enable FT logging on your vmkernel port, but scripting this was harder.

So here it is, just add following lines in your kickstart script.

To create your FT port on vSwitch0

esxcfg-vswitch -A "Fault Tolerance" vSwitch0

To add an ip address to your FT port

esxcfg-vmknic -a -i [FT IP ADDRESS] -n 255.255.255.0 "Fault Tolerance"

If you use vlan's, set the vlan of the FT port
esxcfg-vswitch -v [VLAN of FT IP] -p "Fault Tolerance" vSwitch0

Enabling vmotion will require following code :
vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set vmk0
I created 2 vmkernel ports, 1 for vmotion (vmk0) and 1 for FT (vmk1).

And here it is, to enable FT on your vmkernel port
vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/advopt/update FT.Vmknic string vmk1

Checking afterwards in your VI client will show you that FT is enabled on your vmkernel port.

Gr,

David