In order to correctly use beacon fail-over probing for Vmware vSphere server network connectivity you need:

• 2 physical uplink switches in failover set-up;
• 3 physical uplinks in team per each vSwitch with beacon probing enabled;
• 2 of the uplinks (each going into different uplink switch) must be active and the third physical uplink should be set-up as a Standby adapter.

Beacon probing also works if you are using Vlan trunks. The only difference is that in case of any uplink failure beacon probes will be sent to all vSwitch VLANs increasing traffic a little.

Keep in mind:

You cannot advertise one MAC address to different uplink physical switches or Network flapping may occur. Do not use Beacon probing Network failover detection if you are using IP Hash Load balancing. Use IP Hash load balancing only with Etherchannel.

In a previous post server virtualization vs dedicated server we discussed about increasing availability using virtual servers – hypervisors that offer Live migration in case of one virtual server failure.

Citrix has released free XenServer product that includes Live Migration feature free of charge. Very good news for low budget and small sites that require high-availability at no cost. You just need two hypervisor servers and configure Live Migration feature and you have high-availability. Check it out it’s free and you can download it straight away for in-house testing.