This article describes how to set up high availability (HA) for the primary and worker nodes of the Horizon Cloud Connector appliance. To set up node-level HA for Horizon Cloud Connector, you must first create a vSphere HA cluster and then enable the vSphere VM Monitoring feature.
- Horizon pods deployed on premises
- Horizon pods deployed in VMware Cloud on AWS with all-in-SDDC architecture
Horizon pods deployed in all other environments support single-node clusters consisting of a primary node only and do not support node-level high availability and service-level fault tolerance.
How Horizon Cloud Connector Node-Level HA Works
The primary node and worker node of Horizon Cloud Connector are deployed as virtual machines (VMs) in the pod's vSphere environment.
The vSphere HA feature provides high availability for these VMs by pooling the VMs and the ESXi hosts they reside on into a vSphere HA cluster. Hosts in the cluster are monitored and if a failure occurs, the VMs on a failed host are restarted on alternate hosts. For more information, see How vSphere HA Works.
In addition to HA clusters, vSphere provides the VM Monitoring feature. VM Monitoring restarts individual VMs if their VMware Tools heartbeats or I/O activity are not received within a set time. After a primary node or worker node VM restarts, it can take around 10 minutes for the Horizon Cloud Connector services to become fully operational again on that node. For more information, see VM and Application Monitoring.
Together, vSphere HA clusters and VM Monitoring provide high availability for the Horizon Cloud Connector primary and worker nodes during times of unplanned downtime or outage.
Procedure
Use the following procedure to set up Horizon Cloud Connector node-level HA.
- Create a vSphere HA cluster in the pod's vSphere environment.
For detailed instructions, see Creating a vSphere HA Cluster; that article provides the instructions for vSphere 7.0. To get instructions for a different vSphere version, select that version from the Selected product version menu at the top of the article.
- Enable the VM Monitoring feature for vSphere.
See Enable VM Monitoring, which provides the instructions for vSphere 7.0. To get instructions for a different vSphere version, select that version from the Selected product version menu at the top of the article.
Note: When configuring VM Monitoring, you can configure the level of monitoring sensitivity. Highly sensitive monitoring results in a more rapid conclusion that a failure has occurred. Low sensitivity monitoring results in longer interruptions in service between actual failures and virtual machines being reset. Select an option that is an effective compromise for your needs. For more information, see VM and Application Monitoring.
