VMware HA (High Availability) is a major step in setting up a disaster recovery objective. With HA enabled, each ESXi host checks in on the other hosts and looks for a failure, if a failure should occur the VMs on the failed host are restarted on another server. To enable HA on your network a few prerequisites are required; All VMs and their configuration files must reside on a shared storage, this is required so that all the hosts have access to the VM if the host running it should fail; Each host in a VMware HA cluster must have a host name and a static IP, this will guarantee that each host can monitor each other without having false positives on failure if a host changes IP address; Hosts must be configured to have access to the VM network; Finally VMware recommends a redundant network connection, if a network card should fail this would allow communication to the host it is associated with, without this redundancy the host would seen as failing.
NSI CT Network Support Team explains why virtualization is the key, and asks: If your IT center were to shut down how long could your business stay open? Would you still be able to function in the short run or is everything completely stopped if you don't have access to your IT center? These are some very important questions to ask if you run a business that relies on computers and the internet to function. For every hour that your systems are off line that is revenue lost to your business. By having your servers virtualized you not only save money by reducing hardware and energy consumption, but also increase your ability to recover if a disaster should occur.
Recover to any hardware
