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. Fault Tolerance 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, Fault Tolerance can be activated for specific virtual servers in the cluster. For example, critical workloads such as quarter end processing can be Fault Tolerance protected to provide additional insurance of high-availability.
Additional Fault Tolerance features include automated rollover to redundant servers when a virtual machine fails to respond, resulting in zero downtime and zero data loss. Fault Tolerance works with all shared storage types including Fiber Channel, NAS, and iSCSI, and with all VMware vSphere compatible operating systems. In addition, Fault Tolerance 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 Fault Tolerance compatible. Finally, Fault Tolerance offers easy point and click administration as well as high availability, even in maintenance mode.
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).
