High Availability In Virtual Environments With Veritas Cluster Server and Symantec ApplicationHA
Symantec ApplicationHA is an easy-to-use availability solution specifically built for providing application availability in virtual environments. Veritas Cluster Server is the industry’s leading clustering solution for reducing business critical applications’ planned and unplanned downtime. Through a combination of Veritas Cluster Server and Symantec ApplicationHA, Symantec delivers the broadest out-of-box high availability and disaster recovery support for physical and virtual platforms, databases and mission-critical applications.
High Availability in virtual environments
Server consolidation, one of the most immediate cost-minimizing benefits of server virtualization, provides the ability to run a large number of applications in different virtual machines hosted in the same physical server. However, as the number of critical applications running in the server increases, the importance of ensuring the high availability of this server increases multifold. In addition to protecting against traditional infrastructure availability risks such as storage, networking and power, the virtualized environments impose the additional requirement of ensuring that the virtual machines are highly available as well.
Within any enterprise, there are a number of applications that are critical to the success of the business. Regardless of whether the applications are running in physical or virtual environments, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) expectations for the uptime of these critical applications remain unchanged. With the applications running within the isolation offered by the virtual machines, it is critical that the application status is factored into the overall high availability and disaster recovery considerations.
For a High Availability (HA) solution to be effective in virtual environments, it would need to provide HA not just to the virtual machines but also to the applications running inside the virtual machines. Further, the HA solution should provide this protection without compromising on the inherent benefits of server virtualization, such as easy deployment, rapid provisioning and VM migration. An additional need for the HA solution is to provide deep visibility into the application running inside the virtual machine.
Written by: Ranga Rajagopalan, Principal Product Manager, Storage and Availability Management
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