What is Fault Tolerance?

VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability for applications (with up to four virtual CPUs) by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that mirrors the primary virtual machine. If a hardware outage occurs, vSphere FT automatically triggers failover to eliminate downtime and prevent data loss.

After failover, vSphere FT automatically creates a new, secondary virtual machine to deliver continuous protection for the application.

Protect Your Applications Regardless of Operating System or Underlying Hardware

vSphere Fault Tolerance safeguards any virtual machine (with up to four virtual CPUs), including homegrown and custom applications that traditional high-availability products cannot protect. Key capabilities include the following:

• Compatible with all types of shared storage, including Fibre Channel, Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and network-attached storage (NAS).
• Compatible with all operating systems supported by vSphere.
• Works with existing VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler and VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) clusters for advanced load balancing and optimized initial placement of virtual machines.
• Contains a version-control mechanism that allows primary and secondary virtual machines to run on vSphere FT-compatible hosts at different, but compatible, patch levels.

Simple to Set Up, Start and Stop

vSphere FT can safeguard any number of virtual machines in a cluster because it leverages existing vSphere HA clusters. Administrators can start or stop vSphere FT for specific virtual machines with a point-and-click action in the vSphere web client. Use vSphere FT for applications that require continuous protection during critical times, such as quarter-end processing.