Protection of the virtual infrastructure is an essential topic for every administrator, to limit potential service disruption.

Virtual servers are the most critical infrastructure components since they provide services to the business. Suitable protection of VMs is therefore required to ensure data protection and business continuity.

In this chapter, we described specific availability (and resilience) solutions in vSphere, including the new vSphere HA features, Proactive HA, and Admission Control.

vSphere HA is the essential high-availability mechanism built into the vSphere suite that is responsible for VM restarts when the underlying ESXi hypervisor is unavailable.

Although vSphere HA can provide an essential and convenient availability level for all workloads, with minimum effort and cost, it's not suitable for business-critical workloads. In this case, other solutions can be used, such as vSphere FT or traditional (from the physical world) solutions, such as guest clustering.

This chapter also provided a general overview of some backup solutions available on the market that protect virtual environments. Hyper-scale technology is quite a new solution that reduces the management of workload protection, providing appliances that are ready to go.

We have also described different business continuity and disaster recovery approaches, the overall benefits of BC/DR solutions, and specific VMware products and features that lead to the maximum uptime for your virtual datacenter.

vSphere Replication can be used for business continuity and disaster recovery situations without additional investment compared to traditional storage replication solutions, and can be further extended by the SRM to fully automated disaster recovery.