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Failover Clustering With VMware High Availability A Perfect Match?

November 28, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Failover Clustering with VMware High Availability

Failover Clustering With VMware High Availability: Overkill Or A Perfect Match?

Implementing high availability (HA) at the VMware layer is a useful solution. It helps to protect against some types of failures. However, VMware HA alone simply doesn’t cover all the bases. Let’s explore the possibility of Failover Clustering with VMware High Availability.

According to Gartner Research, most unplanned outages are caused by application failure (40 percent of outages) or admin error (40 percent). Hardware, network, power, or environmental problems cause the rest (20 percent total). VMware HA focuses on protection against hardware failures, but a good application-clustering solution picks up the slack in other areas.

Having A Good Strategy Is Essential For Failover Clustering with VMware High Availability

Here are a few things to consider when architecting the proper HA strategy for your VMware environment.

Failover Clustering With VMware High Availability: Overkill Or A Perfect Match

Shorten Outages With Application-level Monitoring And Clustering

What about recovery speed? In a perfect world, there would be no failures, outages or downtime. But if an unplanned outage does occur, the next best thing is to get up and running again fast. This equation represents the total availability of your environment:

As you can see, detection time is a crucial piece of the equation. Here’s another place where VMware HA alone doesn’t quite cut it. VMware HA treats each virtual machine (VM) as a “black box” and has no real visibility into the health or status of the applications that are running inside. The VM and OS running inside might be just fine, but the application could be stopped, hung, or misconfigured, resulting in an outage for users.

Even when a host server failure is the issue, you must wait for VMware HA to restart the affected VMs on another host in the VMware cluster. That means that applications running on those VMs are down until 1) the outage is detected, 2) the OS boots fully on the new host system, 3) the applications restart, and 4) users reconnect to the apps.

By clustering at the application layer between multiple VMs, you are not only protected against application-level outages, you also shorten your outage-recovery time. The application can simply be restarted on a standby VM, which is already booted up and waiting to take over. To maximize availability, the VMs involved should live on different physical servers. Or even better, separate VMware HA clusters or even separate datacenters!

Eliminate Storage As A Potential Single Point Of Failure (SPOF)

Traditional clustering solutions, including VMware HA, require shared storage and typically protect applications or services only within a single data center. Technically, the shared-storage device represents an SPOF in your architecture. If you lose access to the back-end storage, your cluster and applications are down for the count. The goal of any HA solution is to increase overall availability by eliminating as many potential SPOFs as possible.

So how can you augment a native VMware HA cluster to provide greater levels of availability? To protect your entire stack, from hardware to applications, start with VMware HA. Next, you need a way to monitor and protect the applications. Clustering at the application level (i.e., within the VM) is the natural choice. Be sure to choose a clustering solution that supports host-based data replication (i.e., a shared-nothing configuration) so that you don’t need to go through the expense and complexity of setting up SAN-based replication. SAN replication solutions also typically lock you into a single storage vendor. On top of that, to cluster VMs by using shared storage, you generally need to enable Raw Device Mapping (RDM). This means that you lose access to many powerful VMware functions, such as vMotion.

Going with a shared-nothing cluster configuration eliminates the storage tier as an SPOF. At the same time allows you to use vMotion to migrate your VMs between physical hosts. It’s a win-win! A shared-nothing cluster is also an excellent solution for disaster recovery because the standby VM can reside at a different data center.

Cover All The Bases 

Application-failover clustering, layered over VMware HA, offers the best of both worlds. You can enjoy built-in hardware protection and application awareness, greater flexibility and scalability, and faster recovery times. Even better, the solution doesn’t need to break the bank.

Want to understand how Failover Clustering With VMware High Availability could work for your projects? Check in with SIOS.
Reproduced with permission from LinuxClustering

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: failover clustering with vmware high availability, High Availability, Virtualization, VMware

Credit Union Optimizes Savings with SIOS iQ Machine Learning Analytics

April 22, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Credit Union Optimizes Savings with SIOS iQ Machine Learning Analytics

SIOS iQ Machine Learning Analytics identifies root causes of performance issues, improves efficiency of VMware environment

Case Study: AllSouth Federal Credit Union Saves with SIOS iQ Machine Learning Analytics

The credit union relies on a business critical banking application running on a cloud-based Windows Server. It accesses a large Oracle database hosted in their VMware environment.

The organization felt that traditional tools are all hard to use. It only gave them a limited “siloed” view of the environment. These tools provide a lot of broad information. However these information did not find the source of problems or recommend ways to solve them.

So the IT department came across SIOS machine learning analytics and set up a trial. SIOS iQ immediately provided a holistic view across all of the silos of the operating status of AllSouth’s entire virtual environment. They commented on the ease of implementing SIOS iQ. The dashboard was so user-friendly and intuitive, and was running in a few minutes. SIOS iQ immediately provided a holistic view across all of the silos of the operating status of AllSouth’s entire virtual environment.

Unexpected Benefits With Machine Learning Approach

Since implementing SIOS iQ, AllSouth’s IT team has used it to address a variety of issues. When a performance issue arises, SIOS iQ instantaneously connects that issue to its source in the infrastructure. The software quickly provides specific recommendations for resolving it. As a result, AllSouth’s IT team solves issues faster without the rework and inefficient trial-and-error process needed with traditional tools.

SIOS iQ’s ability to pinpoint and validate sources of performance issues and to calculate potential cost-savings and performance improvements has had unexpected benefits in communicating with management, other departments, and outside vendors.

By enabling the AllSouth IT staff to visualize the interrelationships of objects in their environment, SIOS iQ’s topological mapping also provides both a key training resource and an invaluable diagnostic tool.

To find out how you can benefit from Machine Learning Analytics with SIOS, go here.

 

Filed Under: Success Stories Tagged With: machine learning analytics, VMware

Webinar – Five Options For SQL Server High Availability On VMware

March 12, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Webinar – Clustering 101 – Five Options For SQL Server High Availability On VMware

As part of my Clustering 101 Webinar Series I take a look at five options for providing high availability for SQL Server running on VMware. The webinar was recorded and for those interested, you can watch it here here.

http://discover.us.sios.com/asset-reg-webinar-clustering-101-vmware-sql-server.html

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2015/01/30/clustering-101-five-options-for-sql-server-high-availability-on-vmware/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Clustering, High Availability, SQL Server, SQL Server High Availability, VMware

Installing Windows Server 2012 RC On VMware Workstation Step-By-Step

February 4, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

My take on Windows Server 2012 RC

With Windows Server 2012 RC being released just yesterday, I wanted to see if I could still install it on VMware Workstation as I had done with the Beta version before. The good news is that everything works beautifully. Here is a nice picture of my Windows Server 2012 RC running in VMware Workstation 8.

Installing Windows Server 2012 RC On VMware Workstation Step-By-Step

I was also able to install the Hyper-V Server 2012 RC as well without a problem.

Installing Windows Server 2012 RC On VMware Workstation Step-By-Step

There certainly are a few tricks to be aware of in order to get them to install, so please reference my previous article for the detailed instructions here.

It probably will only be a matter of time before I put Windows Server 8 RC on my laptop and switch to Hyper-V instead of VMware Workstation, but I’ll probably save that for another day when I don’t have some work to get done!

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2012/06/01/installing-windows-server-2012-rc-on-vmware-workstation-step-by-step/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Hyper V, VMware, windows server 2012 rc, Windows Server 8 RC

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

February 1, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Installing Windows Server 8 Beta on VMware Workstation 8? Let’s start!

Below are the screen shots that walk you through the process of installing Windows Server 8 Beta on VMware Workstation 8. I have notated the most important things to notice.

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

 

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

Take note, I choose Windows 7, NOT Windows 7 64-bit. I’m not sure it matters, but I believe this will work best for you.

The download is pre-licenses, so you don’t have to enter anything here. However, this will cause problems later if you don’t disconnect the floppy – more on this later.

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

Click Customize Hardware

Choose the processor that matches your host and enable Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT (your processor must support this) if you want to run the Hyper-V role on this server. See my earlier blog post on how to make that happen.

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

Make sure you unselect “Power on this virtual machine after creation”, we need to edit one more thing before we continue.

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

After you create the VM, go back in and disconnect the Floppy, otherwise the install will fail because the autoinst.flp is missing the product key.

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

 

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

 

 

 

A long while later after a few reboots…

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

How To Install Windows Server 8 Beta On VMware Workstation 8

You are now ready to use Windows Server 8 Beta! I have not installed the VMware tools yet, but I’ll probably try later. If you try it let me know what you think.

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2012/03/01/how-to-install-windows-server-8-beta-on-vmware-workstation-8/

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: installation, preview, VMware, VMware Workstation 8, Windows Server 8 Beta

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