VMotion, DRS and High Availability

VMware have developed pioneering technology that significantly enhances the capabilities and versatility of a virtualised environment. The following products optimise hardware utilisation rates, help you manage and allocate infrastructure resources simply and efficiently, and automatically detect and respond to hardware failures.

VMotion

VMotion technology is unique to VMware and enables you to move an entire running Virtual Machine instantaneously from one server to another. These live migrations are undetectable to the user and enable you to carry out maintenance with zero downtime.

VMware VMotion moves live, running virtual machines from one host to another
while maintaining continuous service availability.

DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler)

VMware's DRS continuously monitors and manages your organisation's utilisation and computing capacity across resource pools and intelligently allocates resources according to predefined rules that reflect your business needs and changing priorities.

DRS continuously balances computing capacity in resource pools to deliver the
performance, scalability and availability not possible with physical infrastructure.

VMware DRS enables you to:

• Ensure that each Virtual Machine has access to the appropriates resources at any one time
• Seamlessly deploy new capacity to the resource pool without disruption
• Undertake planned maintenance with zero downtime by automatically migrating Virtual Machines off physical servers
• Manage your IT infrastructure more effectively and with greater efficiency

VMware HA

VMware HA provides cost–effective high availability for any application running in a virtual machine, regardless of its operating system or underlying hardware configuration. VMware HA eliminates the need for dedicated stand-by hardware and additional software.

Restarts virtual machines almost instantly without human intervention on a different physical server within the same resource pool.

 

Unlike other high availability solutions that are operating system or software application specific, VMware HA represents a consistent, easy to manage high availability solution for the entire IT environment. VMware HA provides basic failover for any application with minimum cost and management overhead.