VCAP-DCA Mock Lab Q2
November 01, 2010 
Sean Crookston 
The following is a mock lab question for the VCAP-DCA exam. I’ve pulled some things from the blueprint that I felt were good to study and tried turning them into an individual question that would aid in studying for the exam. Please provide your feedback and answers to the question in the comments section below. I will post my solution and approve comments with the solution within a few days time.
Question
You have an application running on a virtual machine that is critical to the business. Your boss has asked you if there is a way to make sure this virtual machine has an extra level of protection.
Setup a solution for this virtual machine so that the application is highly available with zero downtime.
Answer
Please provide your solutions, questions, etc in the comments section below.
Tags: 
Following Assumptions:
ESXor ESXi host 4.0 or greater
Host have Fault Tolerance capable CPU
Application is running on 1 vCPU and meets all the other requirements for Fault Tolerance.
Setup a Fault Tolerance on the host, migrate the vm to a host in that cluster and then enable Fault Tolerance on that vm.
Other thought would be to use MSCS, but this limits you to FC only environment (supported)
First I would enable Fault Tolerance, Then I would enable VM & Application Monitoring in HA.
This way I have Protection at the Guest-OS, Application and Host.
Enable Fault Tolerance on VM
Fault Tolerance is definitely what I had in mind on this one.
Only other thing to look for would be if the server had disks that were thin provisioned, would probably need to setup FT Logging too.
As above, except I believe “Application Monitoring” in HA is
only concerned with the VMwareTools “Application” being there
not “applications” as such?