This chapter will focus on specific availability (and resiliency) solutions in vSphere, whereas, with the VMware technology, it is possible to create an entire HA infrastructure on every level.
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 parts of your environment are really important and crucial, so the right design and configuration are needed for your hardware, such as servers, switches, 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 essential and must be resilient. Also, workloads need 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
- Virtual machine clustering
- Virtual machine backup
- VMware vSphere Replication
- Disaster recovery and disaster avoidance
- VMware solutions