Extend and Enhance Protection Across Your Infrastructure

Availability solutions tied to operating systems or applications require complex setup and configuration. In contrast, you can configure our HA capability with a single click from within the vSphere client interface. With simple configuration and minimal resource requirements, HA helps you :

• Provide uniform, automated protection for all applications without modifications to the application or guest operating system.
• Establish a consistent first line of defense for your entire IT infrastructure.
• Protect applications that have no other failover options that might otherwise be left unprotected.

Technical Details

HA provides the foundation for a highly available environment by monitoring virtual machines and the hosts upon which they run. HA is a mature solution that provides scalability, reliability and usability:

 

Scalability

• Master-slave node relationship—Replaces primary and secondary nodes. This new relationship model between nodes in a cluster enables availability actions to be coordinated by a single master node, which in turn communicates all activities and states to VMware vCenter Server. This eliminates much of the planning required to design a highly available environment. Administrators need not worry whether hosts are primary or secondary nodes and where they are located. This is especially significant when deploying HA on blade chassis and in stretched cluster environments.
• Support for IPv6 networking—Enables an IT department in need of a larger “address” space to fully leverage its network infrastructure.
• Simple deployment mechanism—Promotes fast and easy completion of routine tasks such as deploying a vSphere HA agent and configuring HA functionality.

 

Reliability

When an outage occurs, the last thing you want to worry about is whether a high availability solution will work. Guided by real-world customer feedback, VMware has added capabilities to maximize your confidence in HA, including the following:

• Elimination of external component dependencies—HA does not depend on DNS resolution. This reduces the likelihood that an external component outage will disrupt HA operations.
• Multiple communication paths—HA nodes within a cluster can communicate through the storage subsystem as well as over the management network. Multiple communication paths increase redundancy and enable better assessment of the health of a vSphere host and its virtual machines.
• VM-VM anti-affinity rules—HA respects VM-VM anti-affinity rules defined in VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, eliminating the need for VMware vSphere vMotion migrations after failover.

 

Usability

HA’s interface helps you quickly identify the role and state of each node in a cluster. Error condition messages are easy to understand and act upon. In the rare case that an issue does occur with HA, you need only review a single log file — speeding your time to resolution.