Customer is in the process of migrating our customer's COBOL application (Visual COBOL) from a physical RHEL 7.9 server to a VMware-based RHEL 8.10 environment. The customer is currently using a High Availability (HA) clustering setup with NFS as the mount point for data storage in their RHEL 7.9 environment.

As they are moving to VMware, the customer has the following concerns and questions regarding the HA clustering and management of data files in the new setup:

Handling HA Clustering in VMware:
What are the best practices for handling HA clustering for the virtual machines (VMs) in VMware, particularly concerning data files that are shared among multiple VMs ? How do we ensure seamless failover and VMotion of VMs while maintaining access to shared data files during maintenance or failures?

VMware HA Considerations for Active-Active / Active-Passive Configurations:
For Rocket COBOL, can you provide guidance on configuring HA clustering in an active-active or active-passive mode for the VMs running on VMware? Specifically, how do we configure shared storage and failover mechanisms for optimal application availability and performance, considering both VMware HA features and the licensing requirements for COBOL?

Impact of VMware HA and VMotion on Data Storage:
Could you elaborate on how VMware HA and VMotion interact with shared storage configurations (such as NFS or iSCSI) to ensure that the data files remain accessible when VMs are moved or restarted? Are there any recommended storage configurations or considerations to ensure high availability for the data files in the new VMware setup?

Licensing and Compatibility Concerns:
Are there any specific licensing or compatibility concerns with running Rocket COBOL in a virtualized VMware environment, particularly when implementing clustering in either an active-active or active-passive configuration?

We would appreciate any advice or recommendations regarding the optimal configuration for our VMware-based setup to ensure the highest level of reliability and performance for our customer's COBOL application.