Protecting Business-Critical Applications in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment: Using Veritas Cluster Server for VMware ESX Server
Introduction
Server virtualization is becoming increasingly common in the modern data center. Implementing server virtualization enables businesses to consolidate the application workload of multiple servers onto a smaller number of physical hosts, resulting in improved hardware utilization, fewer physical servers, and considerable cost savings.
With these benefits come new challenges. Before server virtualization, a physical server failure would likely result in a single application outage. However, in a consolidated virtual server environment, a physical server outage now has the potential to affect tens of virtual servers, bringing down many applications. This places a renewed emphasis on high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) in the data center. Where in the past service-level agreements (SLAs) for a single application running on a single physical box may not have warranted consideration for HA/DR, when consolidating many applications onto a single physical host, high availability for that host suddenly becomes paramount.
To address the HA/DR needs of their virtual server environment, companies must choose between adapting existing HA/DR solutions (solutions that were designed for physical server architectures), or adopting new HA/DR solutions that are designed specifically for virtual server environments.
A production-class HA/DR solution for business-critical applications should provide:
Monitoring of the application and application resources, including the virtual machine, network components, storage components, and the physical server
Notification during a failure of any of those resources
Automated failover within the same data center or to remote data centers
And ideally, this HA/DR solution should provide the same functionality across physical and virtual environments and single management across all of a data center’s IT platforms to increase operating efficiencies and reduce operating costs.
