Automatic restart of SAP HANA VMs

If one of the hosts in the cluster fails, the vSphere HA feature restarts a VM on another host that has enough free resources. We strongly recommend that you enable this feature in a vSphere cluster with SAP HANA. The SAP HANA service autostart feature must be enabled in the SAP HANA software.

You can enable it 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.

The minimum vSphere HA settings must be in place, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 7.              vSAN cluster HA settings

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 VMware HA “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 as long as the SAP HANA autostart options are enabled.

Enable the heartbeat monitoring feature when vSphere HA is enabled. The recommended setting for Heartbeat monitoring sensitivity is High, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 8.              vSphere settings for VM monitoring

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.