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The following VMware vSphere features support high availability (HA) in the SAP HANA system.
Enable the vSphere HA feature in a vSphere cluster with SAP HANA. If one of the hosts in the cluster fails, this feature restarts a VM on another host that has enough free resources.
You can enable the SAP HANA service autostart feature in the SAP HANA software at the time of the SAP HANA installation or by setting the autostart option to 1 in the /hana/shared/<SID>/profile/<SID>_HDB<InstNo>_<hostname> file.
Ensure that the minimum vSphere HA settings are in place, as shown in the following figure:
The SAP HANA auto-restart watchdog function automatically detects a failure and restarts the corresponding SAP HANA process: nameserver, indexserver, and so on. This service monitors the SAP HANA application and the associated services in a VM.
The VMware HA VM monitoring feature “Guest not heartbeating” restarts the VM guest operating system and SAP HANA on the same host. This feature manages operating system crashes if the SAP HANA autostart options are enabled.
Enable the heartbeat monitoring feature when you enable vSphere HA. We recommend setting Heartbeat monitoring sensitivity to High, as shown in the following figure:
VMware Tools must be installed and running in the VM. You can install VMware Tools as part of the operating system (open-vm-tools) or by using the vSphere web client and selecting Guest OS > Install VMware Tools in the VM context menu.