High Availability

Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, brings with it considerable costs. However, solutions to ensure higher levels of system availability have traditionally been costly, hard to implement, and difficult to manage.

VMware software makes it simpler and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important applications. With VMware virtual infrastructure, you can easily increase the baseline level of availability provided for all applications as well as provide higher levels of availability more easily and cost effectively. VMware virtual infrastructure makes is possible to lower planned downtime, prevent unplanned downtime, and recover rapidly from outages. With VMware virtual infrastructure, customers have been able to:

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, organisations are forced to delay maintenance until inconvenient and difficult-to-schedule downtime windows.

VMware Infrastructure makes it possible for organisations 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 organisations can:

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 utilised 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:

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.