Studying for VCP 5 requires a home lab for walking through the installation steps, learning to manage every single feature of vSphere 5 and getting real hands-on experience.
If you wanted a cost effective solution for your home testlab, you have probably chosen to run everything in a VMware Workstation environment.
Though nesting your vSphere environment inside VMWare Workstation has let you test ESXi installation, vCenter appliance configuration, vMotion, Storage vMotion and much more, there certainly is something you are struggling to enable: Fault Tolerance (FT).
In fact, even if you could get a VM configured for FT, you probably get the following message when powering it on:
'Record/Replay is not supported on this CPU for this guest operating system.'
To work around this issue, you'll have to use BT-based record/replay, which means adding the following option to your FT-enabled VMs:
- replay.allowBTOnly : true
- replay.allowFT : true
- replay.supported : true
These settings are found at VM-level under 'Edit Settings / Options / General / Configuration parameters' (note that this tab can be accessed only with your VM powered off).
The 'replay.allowFT' and 'replay.supported' switches must just be set from false to true while 'replay.allowBTOnly' must be added as a new row.
Of course this setting can be added directly to the vmx file, but for sure you knew that if you are heading to be a VCP.