1. High Availability in Virtualized Environments
Atif Mehmood Malik
Network Engineer, TPS Pakistan
2. Overview
• VMware High Availability
• Challenges in VMware High Availability
• How Symantec addresses these challenges
Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update 2
3. VMware HA
• Easy-to-use, cost effective and native High Availability solution
in virtualized environment
• Minimize unplanned downtime and IT service disruption
• Uniform High Availability solution across all OS platforms
• Minimum cost and management overhead
Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update 3
9. Application Availability
Key requirement for virtualization of critical apps
2. Source: IDC, October 2009. Choosing Storage for Virtualized Servers. For companies with > 1,000 employees.
Key challenges in managing virtualized servers2Leading causes for unplanned outages1
Gartner: 40% of failures are caused by the
application going down
IDC: 51% of respondents rank Application
Availability as the key virtualization challenge
1. Source: Gartner, 30 November 2010
Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update
40% Application
Failures
40% Operations
Errors
20% Security, Power, OS, HW
32%
29%
42%
41%
51%Ensuring Application Availability
Coordinating new deployments
and upgrades
Managing unanticipated cost
increases
Overcoming existing
allocation, purchasing and budget
practices
Compensating for the lack of
integrated management tools
9
11. VMware HA and Symantec ApplicationHA
Meet all HA needs in Virtual Environments
High Availability
11Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update
Application
Availability
Symantec
ApplicationHA
Infrastructure
Availability
VMware HA
12. Symantec ApplicationHA + VMware HA: Virtualize
without compromise
ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware 12
Application
Resources
OS
VM
ESX Server
Site
App
Components
VM1
OS
VM2
OS
VMware ESX
VM2
OS
c3c2
c1
c2 c4
c1 c3c1
c2
VMware HA
protect
infrastructure
components
Symantec
ApplicationHA
protect
application
components
13. Application HA
• Adds a layer of application awareness to the core HA
functionality offered by VMware
• Monitor overall health of configured application by running
specific commands, tests or scripts
• Heartbeat agent sends application heartbeats to VMware HA
• In case of application failure:
– Application HA agents attempt to restart application for a configurable
number of times
– If agents are unable to start the application, Application HA stops sending
application heartbeat to the VMware HA
– VMware HA gracefully restarts the application and Application HA agents
attempt to start application and its dependent components in pre-defined
order
Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update 13
14. VM1
OS
VM2
OS
VM1
OS
VM2
OS
Coordinated recovery between ApplicationHA and
VMware HA
• App monitoring
– Show health status
– Detect app failures
• Coordinated recovery
– Restart applications
– Trigger VMware HA
for further recovery
– Integration via App
Monitoring API
• Protects against wide
range of failures
– Infrastructure failures
– VM is up but app is down
ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware 14
VMware ESX VMware ESX
Application
HA
Application
HA
SQLORA SQLORA
VMware HA VMware HA
– VM recovers after a server failure but app doesn’t
– App is up but not functional
15. Application HA
• Simple administration and full integration with vCenter
• Fully compatible with VMware features like
vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler and Fault Tolerance
• Integration with Site Recovery Manager
• Integration with Backup Exec
Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update 15
16. Integration with vCenter
ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware 16
Aggregated StatisticsData Center Level Alert DetailsBatch Operations
Dashboard also available
on cluster level.
17. Integration with Backup Exec
17ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware
Application
Restart
Virtual Machine
Reboot
Virtual Machine
Image Recovery
Escalation of Remediation Mechanism
Automatically restore, or trigger a prompt for consent to restore, a failed virtual machine
in order to recover lost application services once ApplicationHA has exhausted the steps
available to remediate the failure.
.
Data center administrators are very cautious with virtualizing their applications as their criticality grows. We see that tier 3 applications are virtualized more than tier 2 and tier 2 more than tier 1. There are a few key challenges and one of them is application availability.The results of an IDC survey conducted in October 2009 indicated that 51% of the respondents from companies with > 1000 employees think that ensuring application availability is their key challenge in managing virtualized servers. Need to ensure both the VM and the applications are up in the VMVM can be recovered, but the applications may not have been started or recovered properlyNeed to ensure that the process is up and functionalNeed to ensure that applications start in the right sequence regardless of the VM boot up sequence
