6.5.1
Table Of Contents
- vSphere Availability
- Contents
- About vSphere Availability
- Business Continuity and Minimizing Downtime
- Creating and Using vSphere HA Clusters
- Providing Fault Tolerance for Virtual Machines
- vCenter High Availability
- Plan the vCenter HA Deployment
- Configure the Network
- Configure vCenter HA With the Basic Option
- Configure vCenter HA With the Advanced Option
- Manage the vCenter HA Configuration
- Set Up SNMP Traps
- Set Up Your Environment to Use Custom Certificates
- Manage vCenter HA SSH Keys
- Initiate a vCenter HA Failover
- Edit the vCenter HA Cluster Configuration
- Perform Backup and Restore Operations
- Remove a vCenter HA Configuration
- Reboot All vCenter HA Nodes
- Change the Appliance Environment
- Collecting Support Bundles for a vCenter HA Node
- Troubleshoot Your vCenter HA Environment
- Patching a vCenter High Availability Environment
- Using Microsoft Clustering Service for vCenter Server on Windows High Availability
- Index
Business Continuity and Minimizing
Downtime 1
Downtime, whether planned or unplanned, brings considerable costs. However, solutions that ensure
higher levels of availability have traditionally been costly, hard to implement, and dicult to manage.
VMware software makes it simpler and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important
applications. With vSphere, you can increase the baseline level of availability provided for all applications
and provide higher levels of availability more easily and cost eectively. With vSphere, you can:
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Provide high availability independent of hardware, operating system, and applications.
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Reduce the 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 7
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“Preventing Unplanned Downtime,” on page 8
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“vSphere HA Provides Rapid Recovery from Outages,” on page 8
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“vSphere Fault Tolerance Provides Continuous Availability,” on page 9
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“Protecting the vCenter Server Appliance with vCenter High Availability,” on page 10
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“Protecting vCenter Server with VMware Service Lifecycle Manager,” on page 10
Reducing Planned Downtime
Planned downtime typically accounts for over 80% of data center downtime. Hardware maintenance, server
migration, and rmware updates all require downtime for physical servers. To minimize the impact of this
downtime, organizations are forced to delay maintenance until inconvenient and dicult-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 dierent 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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