VMWorld 2009 Notes: Availability Solutions and Futures

Unplanned outages…
1. Expectations of availability are increasing.
2. RTO is decreasing. Less than 12 hours now.
3. Vmware can protect at each level: component, server, storage, and site.
4. HA– you can now do ha maintenance mode, individual vm health monitoring, priority of vm boot up (admission control).
5. How many vms can you fit on your hosts? You can make memory and cpu reservations per slot.
6. If a host fails…set your restart priority.
7. If you experience an isolated response where a host loses network connectivity, you can set it to turn off the vms or leave them on.
8. Vm monitoring let’s you reset vms if a guest blue screens. You can set the sensitivity of this. It uses a heartbeat to vmware tools to do this. You can set max resets.
9. VMWare FT. Vms run in lockstep, mirroring everything. Uses common disk. Fails over to shadow copy. You need a ft logging nic on each host. You can’t snapshot with FT on!!! What if I want to back it up?
10. Futures…protection for single component failures (like a san, or network), pre-empt failure (host retirement), stretched clusters let’s you set affinity on hosts to a certain site,
11. Netapp metrocluster can use FT to keep everything running across sites.
12. Futures…can dive deeper into the vm at application level to restart services etc based on application level things.
13. Host retirement. Can monitor things that can cause failure, such as hardware cpu and mem, and if it fails, it can put host into maintenance mode.