Mware HA components changed in vSphere 5 where the AAM agent (automated

availability manager) responsible for the communication between hosts present in

the cluster and vCenter, has been replaced by FDM (Fault Domain Manager). I written
also a detailed article about FDM here: vSphere 5 – New High Availability Agent
Introduced – FDM.
VMware High Availability (HA) components

VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) is composed from three main components, which
each of them plays different role.

FDM – Fault Domain Manager is responsible for communication between hosts which
are part of the cluster, informing other members about available resource, and VMs
state. FDM manages the restart of VMs in case host fails.

Hostd Agent – responsible for communication between hostd and vCenter. If this
agent has a problem, then HA stops functionning. Restart possible from DCUI – Under
Troubleshooting Options >Enter > F11 >restart the services OR through the
CLI… ./sbin/services.sh restart

vCenter Server – is used to deploy and configure FDM agents inside the cluster.
Manages the election of server elected master. If the whole vCenter server (or just
the service) fails, the HA still continues to work.

Basic two hosts HA cluster running in my lab.

VMware vSphere HA cluster - Master and Slave concept

To be able to create cluster with ESXi hosts, a vCenter is needed. The most basic
package, vSphere Essentials cannot be used since the limited licensing does not
allow you to create HA cluster as only vSphere Essentials Plus allows you to do
that. The essentials package basicaly allows you manage three hosts from central
location which is – vCenter server for