Before you set up WSFC in a virtual environment, review the list of functions that are not supported for this release, and requirements and recommendations that apply to your configuration.

The following environments and functions are not supported for WSFC setups with this release of vSphere:

  • Using VMDKs on NFS datastore as a shared disk resource for WSFC.
  • Mixed environments, such as configurations where one cluster node is running a different version of ESXi than another cluster node.
  • vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT).
  • Migration with vMotion® of clustered virtual machines using vRDMs.
  • N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
  • ESXi hosts or clusters that have memory overcommitment are not suitable for deploying WSFC virtual machines. Memory overcommitment can cause virtual machines to stall for short durations. This can be significantly disruptive as the WSFC clustering mechanism is time-sensitive and timing delays can cause the virtual machines to behave incorrectly.
  • Suspend or resume of a VM, node of a WSFC.
  • Storage spaces are not supported with Failover clustering on Windows 2012 and above.
  • VM configurations changes:
    • Hot adding memory.
    • Hot adding CPU.
    • Increasing the size of a shared disk is supported only for the disks created from vSphere Virtual Volumes storage with vSphere 8.0 U2 or later.
    • Pausing or resuming the virtual machine state. This I/O intensive operation is disruptive of the timing sensitive WSFC clustering software.
    • Hot adding storage controllers LSI Logic SAS, VMware Paravirtual or NVMe Controller.
    • Hot adding network adapters.
    • Any other hardware changes while cluster VMs are in powered on state except hot add disk or hot share disk.
    • Using snapshots.
    • Cloning a VM.
  • Sharing disks between virtual machines without a clustering solution may lead to data corruptions
  • NVMe controller for WSFC is only supported for Windows Server 2022 with OS Build 20348.1547 and the shared disks should be created only from Clustered VMDK activated datastores (SCSI or NVMe). To use NVMe Controller, virtual machine hardware version must be 21 or later.