Automating your failover, backup and recovery in your virtual infrastructure ensures that you can recover from unplanned hardware, software, or user errors with minimal downtime and less complexity than traditional failover, backup and recovery processes.
Best Practice Guides
VMware Fault Tolerance Recommendations and Considerations on VMware vSphere 4
VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) is a feature available with VMware vSphere 4 that allows a virtual machine to continue running even when the underlying physical server fails. It is a software solution that runs on commodity hardware and does not require any modifications to the guest operating system or applications running inside the virtual machine. This paper gives a brief overview of how VMware FT works and provides a list of requirements. The paper also describes several usage scenarios along with application and reliability recommendations. Finally, a summary of performance recommendations is included.
VMware VMbook - A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure
This VMware® VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time of test or during an actual event that necessitated the declaration of a disaster, resulting in the activation of services in a designated BCDR site.
VMware HA: Concepts and Best Practices
This paper describes the use of VMware HA to system and server administrators and IT architects. The paper addresses the important details of the VMware HA architecture and expounds on configuration and implementation topics and how to avoid configuration issues.
Using VMware Infrastructure for Backup and Restore
This white paper describes what resources should be backed up on a VMware ESX system and explains the options available for that backup, including advantages and disadvantages of each option.
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 Evaluator Guide
The Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Evaluator Guide is intended to provide the SRM customers and evaluators with a guide that will walk them through the SRM workflow that has to be completed to allow for the successful and automated service failover from the designated SRM protected site to the designated SRM recovery site. This guide will also provide an overview which includes the considerations and guidance to execute a failback of services from the recovery site back to the site that was originally designated as the SRM protected site.
Additional Resources
HCL: Backup Software Compatibility for VMware ESX
This Web page describes the specific backup software packages tested by VMware for use with VMware ESX.
VMware Consolidated Backup: Improvements in Version 3.5
This paper describes the new features of VMware Consolidated Backup that was released for VMware Infrastructure, explaining each feature in depth with discussion on how customers can benefit with those features.
Take the Next Step
Discover how to implement robust failover and load balancing or learn more about using vSphere HA, vSphere FT and vSphere DRS for ensuring the availability of critical IT services and applications.
