Home > Workload Solutions > SAP > Guides > SAP HANA HCI Guides > SAP HANA Deployments on Dell XC Family Systems Using Nutanix AOS and VMware vSphere > High availability for SAP HANA VMs
The SAP HANA service auto restart watchdog function automatically detects a failure and restarts the corresponding SAP HANA process (nameserver, index server, and so on). This feature monitors the SAP HANA application and the associated services within a VM. The “Guest not heartbeating” function restarts the guest operating system of the VM as well as SAP HANA on the same host. The heartbeat monitoring feature also handles operating system failures if the SAP HANA autostart options are enabled (see Automatic restart of SAP HANA VMs).
Enable the heartbeat monitoring feature when vSphere HA is enabled. The recommended setting for monitoring sensitivity is High, as shown in the following figure:
VMware Tools must be installed and running in the VM. Install VMware Tools as part of the operating system open-vm-tools or through the vSphere web client by selecting Guest OS >
Install VMware Tools in the VM context menu.