High Availability in Virtualized Environments

Atif Mehmood MalikNetwork Engineer, TPS Pakistan

Overview• VMware High Availability• Challenges in VMware High Availability• How Symantec addresses these challenges

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VMware HA• Easy-to-use, cost effective and native High Availability solution in

virtualized environment• Minimize unplanned downtime and IT service disruption• Uniform High Availability solution across all OS platforms• Minimum cost and management overhead

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VMware HA

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• VMware cluster

VMware HA

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• Virtual Machine OS failure

VMware HA

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• Physical Server failure

VMware HA • Global failure

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• Virtualization widely-adopted for non-

critical applications

• Business critical applications are

infrequently virtualized

• Virtualization vendors fail to ensure

application availability

Key Challenges: Ensuring Application Availability

Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware 8

TIER 3 TIER 2 TIER 1

IISApache

Print

WebLogicWebSphere

File

SQL, OracleSAP

Exchange

Criticality of applications

Virt

ualiz

ation

ado

ption

Low adoption beyond Tier 3

Application AvailabilityKey requirement for virtualization of critical apps

2. Source: IDC, October 2009. Choosing Storage for Virtualized Servers. For companies with > 1,000 employees.

Key challenges in managing virtualized servers2Leading causes for unplanned outages1

Gartner: 40% of failures are caused by the application going down

IDC: 51% of respondents rank Application Availability as the key virtualization challenge

1. Source: Gartner, 30 November 2010Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update

40% Application Failures

40% Operations Errors

20% Security, Power, OS, HW

Series1

32%

29%

42%

41%

51%Ensuring Application Availability

Coordinating new deployments and upgrades

Managing unanticipated cost increases

Overcoming existing allocation, purchasing and budget practices

Compensating for the lack of integrated management tools

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Virtualize Without Compromise

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VMware HA and Symantec ApplicationHAMeet all HA needs in Virtual Environments

High Availability

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ApplicationAvailabilitySymantec

ApplicationHA

InfrastructureAvailabilityVMware HA

Symantec ApplicationHA + VMware HA: Virtualize without compromise

ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware 12

Application Resources

OS

VM

ESX Server

Site

App Components

VM1

OS

VM2

OS

VMware ESX

VM2

OS

c3c2

c1

c2 c4

c1 c3c1

c2

VMware HA

protect infrastructure components

Symantec ApplicationHA

protect application

components

Application HA• Adds a layer of application awareness to the core HA

functionality offered by VMware• Monitor overall health of configured application by running

specific commands, tests or scripts• Heartbeat agent sends application heartbeats to VMware HA• In case of application failure:

– Application HA agents attempt to restart application for a configurable number of times

– If agents are unable to start the application, Application HA stops sending application heartbeat to the VMware HA

– VMware HA gracefully restarts the application and Application HA agents attempt to start application and its dependent components in pre-defined order

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VM1

OS

VM2

OS

VM1

OS

VM2

OS

Coordinated recovery between ApplicationHA and VMware HA

• App monitoring – Show health status

– Detect app failures

• Coordinated recovery– Restart applications

– Trigger VMware HAfor further recovery

– Integration via App Monitoring API

• Protects against wide range of failures– Infrastructure failures

– VM is up but app is down

ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware 14

VMware ESX VMware ESX

ApplicationHA

ApplicationHA

SQLORA SQLORA

VMware HA VMware HA

– VM recovers after a server failure but app doesn’t

– App is up but not functional

Application HA• Simple administration and full integration with vCenter• Fully compatible with VMware features like vMotion,

Distributed Resource Scheduler and Fault Tolerance• Integration with Site Recovery Manager• Integration with Backup Exec

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Integration with vCenter

ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware 16

Aggregated StatisticsData Center Level Alert DetailsBatch Operations

Dashboard also available on cluster level.

Integration with Backup Exec

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ApplicationHA 6.0 VMware

Application

Restart

Virtual Machine

Reboot

Virtual Machine

Image Recovery

Escalation of Remediation Mechanism

Automatically restore, or trigger a prompt for consent to restore, a failed virtual machine in order to recover lost application services once ApplicationHA has exhausted the steps available to remediate the failure.

.

Thank you!

Copyright © 2010 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec and the Symantec Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

This document is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as advertising. All warranties relating to the information in this document, either express or implied, are disclaimed to the maximum extent allowed by law. The information in this document is subject to change without notice.

Thank you!

Ensure 24x7 Availability: HA/DR 6.0 Update

Atif Mehmood Malikatif.malik@tpsonline.com

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