In today’s 24/7 business world, downtime and server availability can be a company’s worst nightmare. However, the integrated features of vSphere’s Fault Tolerance (FT) effectively eliminate any possibility of downtime or lack of availability, keeping your business running smoothly.
Virtual servers are becoming the norm in enterprise level networks. The many benefits include higher server consolidation ratios and more efficient resource utilization. vSphere’s Fault Tolerance feature maintains 24/7 data systems uptime, giving businesses the virtual protection they need. Along with virtual servers, systems data is protected as well. This service is simple to activate and maintain, and provides continuous automated protection of select or systems wide virtual machines.
Fault Tolerance maintains continuous availability of applications in the event of hardware failures by allowing the virtual machine to run in parallel with the primary virtual server. In then event of a hardware failure, the virtual machine seamlessly takes over. The feature also protects any kind of operating system or hardware along with homegrown or custom application, all without the expensive traditional high availability products, or the need for modifications or reconfiguration.
Set up is simple; by leveraging existing vSphere clusters, this feature can be activated for specific virtual servers in the cluster. For example, critical workloads such as quarter end processing can be protected to provide additional insurance of high-availability.
Additional features include automated rollover to redundant servers when a virtual machine fails to respond, resulting in zero downtime and zero data loss. FT works with all shared storage types including Fiber Channel, NAS, and iSCSI, and with all VMware vSphere compatible operating systems. In addition, it is compatible with existing DRS and HA clusters with a single dedicated gigabit Ethernet network, allowing advanced load balancing and optimized placement of virtual machines. The service is also attuned with all vSphere hosts, thus primary and secondary virtual machines can run under different patch levels. Advanced login gives the ability to differentiate between primary and secondary VM’s and report if a vSphere host is not compatible with this feature. Finally, FT offers easy point and click administration as well as high availability, even in maintenance mode.
By creating a live shadow instance of your virtual machines that is synchronized with your primary servers, FT enables instantaneous fail over of virtual machines in the event of hardware failure. Even the smallest chance of system disruption or downtime is reduced. And this protection is provided regardless of the underlying hardware or operating system type including custom and in-house applications that cannot be protected with traditional high availability products.
Turning on or off the feature is simple and easy, either per machine or across the entire virtual network. Because existing high availability clusters are leveraged, FT can be scaled as your network grows. FT resources can be allocated to critical times such as quarter end processing, and high availability can be assured even during cluster maintenance operations.
FT is offered as an additional component of the VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus or as an add-on acceleration kit (vCenter Server is a requirement for Fault Tolerance activation).
