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PDFNext up, its time to create our cluster. Right click on your datacenter, and select “New Cluster”.
You’ll now be presented with another wizard to create the cluster. By default, you don’t have to enable DRS and HA as these are, shall we say, rather expensive add-ons.
The reason I am including these features in this article, is because despite VMware’s pricing model to make money, these features are *common* basic features of any virtualization technology. VMware have simply applied a costing method to charge you for the use.
Select a name to give to your cluster, and if you wish to configure HA (Auto-VM failover) and DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), place a tick next to each item.
Click “Next” to continue.
Next, if you have enabled DRS, you will be prompted to set an automation level for distributing resources. I recommend leaving this to “Fully automated”, however some people feel uncomfortable about having virtual servers migrating to different physical hosts. If you are oe of these people, set it to “Manual”.
Click “Next” to proceed
You have the option to configure power management on your cluster. This option is useful if you are working towards minimizing your carbon foot print in your infrastructure. This is something you should test before implementing, so I will leave this to the default which is off for the purpose of this article.
Click “Next” to proceed.
If you selected HA at the start of the wizard, you will now be asked for a few details about your preferred configuration. I recommend leaving this as default if you are using this in a small implementation.
Click “Next” to continue.
Should you wish, you can change the default Virtual Machine option. These settings are used to determine the manner in which VM’s are restarted after a failure.
When ready, click “Next” to proceed.
Next up, you have VM Monitoring. You can enable this *if* you have VMware tools instealled on every single VM you will use. Linux installations are getting to the stage of not needing it, so I can’t justify turning this option on.
Click “Next” to continue.
Now you have the ability to enable “EVC” which is “Enhanced vMotion Compatibility”. This is used to ensure that vMotion is only ever used on optimal configurations and circumstances. If you wish to use this feature, as always, I recommend testing it first. Otherwise, leave this to the default option of “Disable EVC”
Click “Next” to proceed.
Lastly, you should chose where you wish to keep your VM swap file. This is a file that stores the CPU and Memory commits of the running VM. VMware recommend keeping the swap file in the same shared datastore as the virtual disks.
Click “Next” to proceed.
and FINALLY, we are ready to finish creating the cluster. Click “Finish” to create the cluster.
