Slash Planned Downtime
Planned downtime typically accounts for over 80% of datacenter downtime. Hardware maintenance, server migration, and firmware updates all require downtime for physical servers. To minimize the impact of this downtime, organizations are forced to delay maintenance until inconvenient and difficult-to-schedule downtime windows.
VMware Infrastructure makes it possible for organizations to dramatically reduce planned downtime. Because workloads in a VMware Infrastructure environment can be dynamically moved to different physical servers without downtime or service interruption, server maintenance can be performed without requiring application and service downtime. With VMware Infrastructure organizations can:
- Eliminate downtime for common maintenance operations
- Eliminate planned maintenance windows
- Perform maintenance at any time without disrupting users and services
Prevent Unplanned Downtime
VMware Infrastructure builds important fault tolerance capabilities into datacenter infrastructure. Because they are part of virtual infrastructure, these capabilities are transparent to the operating system and applications running in virtual machines. These features can be easily configured and can be utilized by all of the virtual machines on a physical system, reducing the cost and complexity of providing higher availability. Key fault-tolerance capabilities built into VMware Infrastructure include:
- Network interface teaming to provide tolerance of individual network card failures
- Storage multi-pathing to tolerate storage path failures
Ensure Rapid Recovery from Outages
VMware software makes possible rapid and automated restart and failover without the cost or complexity of solutions used with physical infrastructure. Virtual machines are hardware-independent and can share physical resources, thus failover can be implemented without requiring dedicated, identical standby hardware and the added complexity of maintaining identical configurations.
For server failures, VMware High Availability (HA)—a component of VMware Infrastructure 3—ensures rapid, automated restart of virtual machines. VMware HA automatically and intelligently restarts affected virtual machines on other production servers. As a part of virtual infrastructure, VMware HA can be easily configured for a server without dependencies on operating system, applications, or physical hardware.
Customers can also use third-party clustering software in virtual environments by clustering virtual machines with other virtual machines or clustering physical machines with other physical machines. VMware software makes it possible to implement clustering without requiring the cost of identical servers, without the complexity of rebuilding clustering when physical hardware changes, and without the difficulty associated with testing clustering of physical systems.
Business Continuity Next Steps
Get cost-effective, simple, and reliable solutions for your business today. You can contact VMware directly at 1-877-4VMWARE (650-427-5000 outside of North America), submit an online Solutions Request, or contact sales.
