Hello everyone,
I've done some searching in the admin guides and community forums, and I'm pretty sure I know what needs to be done but I would really appreciate a sanity check here as the manipulation I'm doing is on a production environment:
I've got a campus that has two ESX boxes that are managed via vSphere and hooked up to a SAN. vMotion's working just fine, performance is pretty good (though both boxes' resources are pretty full up). However, I realised just recently that I'd neglected to set it up as an HA & DRS cluster. I'd like to fix this.
I've created the cluster with these specs:
- enabled both HA & DRS,
- left it as fully automated,
- left power management off,
- enabled host monitoring and admission control
- left the default settings for VM behavior
- disabled VM monitoring
- enabled EVC
- set storage of swapfile to be with the VM
I think the next steps would be to add each ESX host consecutively and merge its resources with the cluster's. Here are a few questions though:
- How would you rate the risk factor of doing this on a production environment (1 = Perfectly safe, is a well-tested scenario; 5 = are you out of your bloody mind??? Don't do it)
- Should I be triple-checking the SAN's snapshots and planning downtime for the servers, or can this be done live and without any major fuss?
- Am I correct in assuming that this will increase my performance as well as provide better robustness to the campus, or should I expect a decrease in performance?
Many thanks in advance for your advice!