This chapter will focus on specific availability (and resiliency) solutions in vSphere, whereas with VMware technology, it is possible to create total HA infrastructure on every level. Starting from the infrastructure level, using the new vSphere HA features, the proactive HA, or also the new vCenter HA configuration, specific for the vCSA deployment of vCenter Server.

When we think about how we can work with all the benefits of VMware solutions, we see a lot of positions and levels where it is possible to protect the infrastructure. Still, the physical and infrastructural part of your environment is really important and crucial, so a correct design and configuration is needed for your hardware parts, such as servers, switch, storage, and host bus adapter (HBA), in order to design and configure all of them without a potential single point of failure.  

However, only the infrastructure level is important and must be resilient, also workload needs a good HA level according to business requirements and needs. There are not only several native solutions that can be used, such as NIC teaming, multipathing for storage, vSphere High Availability (HA) and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), but also other solutions typically, from the physical world, such as guest clustering.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• vSphere HA
• vSphere FT
• vCenter HA
• vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager