Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters - VMware Virtual Machines as Cluster Members

Contents

• Overview
  • Applicable Environments
  • Recommended Prior Reading
  • Useful References and Guides
  • Introduction
• Policies

Overview

Applicable Environments

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the High Availability Add-On
• Using a VMware virtualization solution to provide VMs that may serve as High Availability cluster members

Recommended Prior Reading

• General conditions with virtualized cluster members

Useful References and Guides

• Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters

Introduction

This guide offers Red Hat's policies, requirements, and limitations applicable to the use of VMware virtual machines as members of a RHEL High Availability cluster. Users of RHEL High Availability software components should adhere to these policies by installing only on the approved platforms in order to be eligible to receive assistance from Red Hat Support with the appropriate support subscriptions.

Policies

Consider general conditions for support of RHEL High Availability in virtualization environments

• See: General conditions with virtualized cluster members

Supported VMware products/releases with RHEL High Availability: Red Hat provides support for RHEL High Availability cluster members running on the following VMware products and releases:

• VMware vSphere and VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) - All 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x releases
  • RHEL 6
  • RHEL 7
  • RHEL 8
  • RHEL 9
• VMware vSphere and VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) - 8.x on:
  • RHEL 7
  • RHEL 8
  • RHEL 9

Any product/release combination not listed here is not supported by Red Hat as a platform for RHEL High Availability cluster members.

Cluster-shared-storage configurations: See support policy page: Support Policies for RHEL Resilient Storage Clusters - Resilient Storage on VMware

Available fence methods: See applicable support policies for individual fence methods that may be under consideration for VMware environments:

• Support policies: fence_vmware_soap
• Support policies: fence_scsi / fence_mpath
• Support policies: fence_vmware_rest
  • Take note of the limits applicable to these agents on VMware platforms.
• Support policies: sbd and fence_sbd
  • Take note of the limitations when using a software emulated watchdog:
    • Software-Emulated Watchdog Known Limitations
    • Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters - sbd and fence_sbd

See Red Hat's guidance for VMware VM cluster members which gives more instruction on choosing a STONITH method: Design guidance - VMware VMs as Cluster Members

Mixed baremetal and VMware VM clusters: Red Hat provides support for clusters consisting of both baremetal systems and VMware virtual machines, subject to these other applicable policies.

Cluster nodes hosted on VMware Cloud: Currently this is unsupported and for more information see: Does Red Hat support VMware cloud hosts as members of a High Availability cluster?

Cluster nodes hosted on VMware Cloud on AWS (Amazon Web Services): Currently this is unsupported and for more information see: Does Red Hat support VMware cloud hosts as members of a High Availability cluster?

Cluster nodes hosted on VMware Cloud hosts on AVS (Azure Vmware Solutions): Currently this is unsupported and for more information see: Does Red Hat support VMware Cloud hosts on AVS (Azure Vmware Solutions) as members of a RHEL High Availability cluster?

No support for fence_vmware: Red Hat once shipped an agent known as fence_vmware - a separate entity from fence_vmware_soap - but no longer includes this in the fence-agents packages. This agent is no longer supported, and has been replaced by fence_vmware_soap.