Shared IT Services Platform
for Your Applications

Availability: Flexible, Uniform High Availability

A shared IT services platform for a cloud infrastructure needs to improve application availability by providing capabilities to protect against planned infrastructure downtime and provide resilience to unplanned downtime across all aspects of the hardware – server, component, storage, network and software. VMware's offering does this with wide ranging capabilities to protect applications from:

• Planned infrastructure downtime (VMotion, Storage VMotion)
• General application protection from unplanned infrastructure downtime (NIC teaming, multi-pathing, HA, VM-level fault tolerance, VCB, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager)
• Unplanned application downtime (HA-VM failure monitoring, VM-level fault tolerance)

The inherent reliability of VMware ESX is also a big factor here, ensuring that no new risks are introduced into the environment because of the hypervisor.

VMware High Availability provides cost-effective high availability for any application running in a virtual machine without the cost or complexity of traditional clustering offerings like Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS). Regardless of the guest operating system or underlying hardware configuration, VMware HA provides protection across your entire virtualized IT, eliminating the need for dedicated stand-by hardware. Watch a technical video on: VMware High Availability and VMware vSphere Other virtualization vendors cannot deliver this pervasive, failover protection as an integrated capability of their virtualization platform. VMware HA is a simple, scalable and cost-effective solution for high availability in virtual environments.

• VMware HA is a more scalable solution than clustering options, making it suitable for an organization’s entire infrastructure. VMware HA can now support up to 32 nodes in a cluster (vs. the 16 of Windows Server 2008 Cluster Server 64-bit), improving availability for critical applications by scaling across a larger number of VMware ESX hosts.
• VMware HA is a more flexible solution and avoids the storage management complexity inherent in Microsoft’s clustering solution. Because VMware HA is built on VMware vStorage VMFS clustered file system capabilities, users can safely run HA on virtual machines that are mapped on the same shared storage LUN. Each virtual machine can be restarted independently without affecting the other virtual machines on that same LUN. Microsoft MSCS restarts all the virtual machines on a LUN, even if not all of them are located on a failed host, forcing users that want to have high availability to provision one LUN for each virtual machine they deploy. This limitation has a negative impact on storage administration and consumption, making management substantially more complex and reducing administrators’ productivity as the number of virtual machines grows.

See how VMware HA can save $60,000 per year in a 150 VM environment.

VMware Fault Tolerance provides zero downtime and zero data loss availability for all virtual machines against x86 hardware failures. Enabling fault tolerance for a specific virtual machine enables that workload to run on two different ESX hosts simultaneously and allows the virtual machine to run seamlessly in the event of hardware failure on either host.

Watch a technical video on: VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware vSphere

See how VMware Fault Tolerance can save $69,000 per year in a 150 VM environment.

 

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