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Avoiding downtime with VMware Fault Tolerance and High Availability
Editor's note
VMware's Fault Tolerance (FT) and High Availability (HA) are both focused on uptime and keeping
virtual machines running. Once a company determines its uptime and data recovery needs, it can
decide whether High Availability or Fault Tolerance is the better choice.
While Fault Tolerance is a high availability feature that can be used in a VMware HA cluster, there
are meaningful differences between the two. Each requires a setup with different available
resources and both have a different effect on virtual machines.
The resources presented in this guide to VMware FT and HA will help you understand your options with some real-world use cases to compare to your IT infrastructure and needs.
1Requirements
It's important to differentiate how High Availability and Fault Tolerance operate. If you can't afford to have interruption, Fault Tolerance instantly gets to work after a host failure. HA can get virtual machines back up and running with very little disturbance.
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Options for VMware High Availability
VMware High Availability comes from software, rather than hardware, features. This tip helps refine the settings that align with your environment's requirements. Read Now
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Requirements for Fault Tolerance and FT logging
It's crucial to know the Fault Tolerance requirements to ensure your customer's environment is safe in the instance of a host failure. Read Now
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Multi-vCPU Fault Tolerance
At VMworld 2014, VMware released one of the biggest upgrades to Fault Tolerance when it announced multi-vCPU Fault Tolerance. Read Now
2Using High Availability and Fault Tolerance
Now that you know what Fault Tolerance and High Availability are, it's time to focus on them in action. These real-world scenarios for implementation will help you to better understand how and why to use either tool.
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Pairing VMware HA with DRS
Ensure you're taking full advantage of VMware HA and DRS by creating and documenting rules and policies. Together the pair can help improve virtual server performance and uptime. Read Now
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Don't ditch DR for HA just yet
While there are high-availability features that make it seem like you can ditch disaster recovery, there is reason to rely on more than just HA clustering. Read Now
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Building a KVM high availability cluster
High availability is more than just for VMware environments. Most Linux distributions include everything you need to build a KVM high availability cluster to protect your environment. Read Now
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When to enable Fault Tolerance
While it's easy to enable VMware Fault Tolerance, there is no need to use it on every virtual machine. Read Now