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Avoiding downtime with VMware Fault Tolerance and High Availability
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Article
How Fault Tolerance works
In today's fast paced world, some businesses can't afford to have a workload interruption. Fault Tolerance, a feature in vSphere, ensures VMs will continue to function if a server goes under. Read Now
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Article
High Availability best practices and guidelines
Many people can confuse VMware High Availability with Fault Tolerance but HA only deals with restarting those virtual machines on other hosts that have the resources to support the VM Read Now
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Article
High Availability vs. Fault Tolerance
Choosing between VMware's High Availability and Fault Tolerance can be difficult but this breakdown on various scenarios can assist with the decision process. Read Now
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Requirements for vSphere Fault Tolerance
An administrator who wants to implement Fault Tolerance needs to check several key areas to make sure a VM performs properly to ensure a server outage doesn't slow the business down. Read Now
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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Article
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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What vSphere 5 brought to HA
When VMware released vSphere 5 a couple years ago, High Availability got an overhaul, including a new election process that helps determine what to do if a cluster node fails. Read Now
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Article
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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Article
Server Heartbeat's death could mean more HA options soon
Without the option to purchase vCenter Server Heartbeat, administrators seeking high availability for vCenter Server have to weigh their options, which may include new choices down the road. Read Now
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Article
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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Article
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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Article
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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Article
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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Article
Scaling out to save money on a high-availability architecture
Traditional high-availability architectures rely on expensive shared storage and premium hypervisor features, but sometimes you can save money by scaling out instead of up. Read Now
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Article
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
3Glossary
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Definition
Uptime and downtime
Uptime is a computer industry term for the time during which a computer is operational. Read Now
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Definition
Fault Tolerant
Systems with integrated fault tolerance are designed to withstand multiple hardware failures to ensure continuous availability. Read Now
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Definition
High availability
High availability (HA) is the ability of a system or system component to be continuously operational for a desirably long length of time. Read Now
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Definition
High availability cluster
A high availability cluster is a group of hosts that act like a single system and provide continuous uptime. Read Now
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Definition
VMware HA (high availability)
VMware vSphere HA (High Availability) is a utility included in VMware's vSphere software that can restart failed virtual machines (VMs) on alternative host servers to reduce application downtime. Read Now
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Definition
VMware vSphere App HA
VMware vSphere App HA is virtual appliance introduced with vSphere 5.5. It works with vSphere HA (high availability) host monitoring and virtual machine monitoring to improve application uptime. Read Now
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Definition
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat vCSHB
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat (vCSHB) is VMware's OEM version of NeverFail, which is designed to ensure the high availability and disaster recovery of vCenter Server whether on a LAN or a Wireless Wide Area Network. Read Now
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Definition
HA storage
High-availability storage (HA storage) is a storage system that is continuously operational or provides at least 99% uptime. Read Now