Get Automatic Recovery with High Availability (HA) Clusters
Pool your hardware resources from multiple VMware ESX servers and get automatic recovery from system failures with VMware High Availability (HA) clusters. Manage the hardware resources of multiple VMware ESX hosts without requiring dedicated cluster administrators or standby hardware, as required by traditional clusters. Extend the breadth of your application coverage through VMware HA clusters to all your application services, rather than limiting high availability to a few mission-critical services.
Creating VMware HA clusters is much simpler than setting up traditional clusters. VMware VirtualCenter, the centralized management core of VMware Infrastructure, includes a helpful Cluster Wizard that walks you through the steps of creating a VMware HA cluster. Once your cluster is created, you can quickly add and subtract VMware ESX hosts and virtual machines, set priority for individual virtual machines and make restart decisions. When you add a new VMware ESX host, any excess capacity beyond what is required for each virtual machine running on that host VMware ESX is added to your cluster’s resource pool. You can easily see information about your clusters and virtual machines assigned to that cluster, configuration details, failover settings and flags for overcommitted clusters, making management of your VMware HA clusters much easier when compared to traditional cluster solutions.
Optimize Hardware Usage with Automated Load Balancing
Maximize your hardware utilization with Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS). Set up resource pools, aggregating the resources of your VMware ESX, and then apply resource allocation rules for dynamic resource allocation in a way that is completely transparent to the user. Automated resource optimization of multiple VMware ESX servers that have been setup in an HA cluster that is DRS enabled lets you ensure that each virtual machine gets the resources it needs, when it needs them, in a manner aligned with your business priorities.
When you assign VMware ESX hosts and virtual machines to a VMware HA cluster that is DRS enabled, the resources of that host become part of the cluster’s pooled resources, which you can then enable for DRS. You can select how automated you want the migration of virtual machines to be, assign virtual machines to resource pools, set the relative importance of each virtual machine, set limits for CPU or memory for each virtual machine, allowing you to meet your business objectives while maximizing your hardware utilization.
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