Preparing for a high availability scenario
As with every project, high availability (HA) scenario starts with a planning phase. Virtualization projects often turn up the question of additional availability for the first time in an environment. In traditional datacenters with physical server systems and local storage systems, an outage of a hardware component will affect only one server hosting one service. The source of the outage can be localized very fast and the affected parts can be replaced in a short time. Server virtualization comes with great benefits, such as improved operating efficiency and reduced hardware dependencies. However, a single component failure can impact a lot of virtualized systems at once. By adding redundant systems, these single points of failure can be avoided.
Planning an HA environment
The most important factor in whether you need a HA environment is your business requirements. You need to find out how often and how long an IT-related production service can be...