Minimize Downtime from Server and OS Failures with VMware vSphere High Availability

VMware vSphere High Availability delivers the availability required by most applications running in virtual machines, independent of the operating system and applications running in it. High Availability provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against hardware and operating system outages within your virtualized IT environment. High Availability allows you to:

Monitor VMware vSphere hosts and virtual machines to detect hardware and guest operating system failures.
Restart virtual machines on other vSphere hosts in the cluster without manual intervention when a server outage is detected.
Reduce application downtime by automatically restarting virtual machines upon detection of an operating system failure.

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Eliminate Downtime for Mission Critical Applications

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 High Availability capability with a single click from within the vSphere client interface. With simple configuration and minimal resource requirements, High Availability 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

High Availability provides the foundation for a highly available environment by monitoring virtual machines and the hosts upon which they run. High Availability 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 High Availability 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 High Availability agent and configuring High Availability 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 High Availability, including the following:

Elimination of external component dependencies—High Availability does not depend on DNS resolution. This reduces the likelihood that an external component outage will disrupt High Availability operations.
Multiple communication paths—High Availability 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—High Availability respects VM-VM anti-affinity rules defined in VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, eliminating the need for VMware vSphere vMotion migrations after failover.

Usability

High Availability’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 High Availability, you need only review a single log file — speeding your time to resolution.