6.0.1
Table Of Contents
- vSphere Availability
- Contents
- About vSphere Availability
- Updated Information
- Business Continuity and Minimizing Downtime
- Creating and Using vSphere HA Clusters
- Providing Fault Tolerance for Virtual Machines
- Index
Business Continuity and Minimizing
Downtime 1
Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, brings with it considerable costs. However, solutions to ensure
higher levels of availability have traditionally been costly, hard to implement, and difficult to manage.
VMware software makes it simpler and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important
applications. With vSphere, organizations can easily increase the baseline level of availability provided for
all applications as well as provide higher levels of availability more easily and cost effectively. With
vSphere, you can:
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Provide higher availability independent of hardware, operating system, and applications.
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Reduce planned downtime for common maintenance operations.
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Provide automatic recovery in cases of failure.
vSphere makes it possible to reduce planned downtime, prevent unplanned downtime, and recover rapidly
from outages.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Reducing Planned Downtime,” on page 9
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“Preventing Unplanned Downtime,” on page 10
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“vSphere HA Provides Rapid Recovery from Outages,” on page 10
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“vSphere Fault Tolerance Provides Continuous Availability,” on page 11
Reducing Planned Downtime
Planned downtime typically accounts for over 80% of data center downtime. Hardware maintenance, server
migration, and firmware updates all require downtime for physical servers. To minimize the impact of this
downtime, organizations are forced to delay maintenance until inconvenient and difficult-to-schedule
downtime windows.
vSphere makes it possible for organizations to dramatically reduce planned downtime. Because workloads
in a vSphere environment can be dynamically moved to different physical servers without downtime or
service interruption, server maintenance can be performed without requiring application and service
downtime. With vSphere, organizations can:
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Eliminate downtime for common maintenance operations.
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Eliminate planned maintenance windows.
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Perform maintenance at any time without disrupting users and services.
VMware, Inc.
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