Overview of High Availability

After you have created virtual machines in your XenServer environment, you should guarantee that services offered by these virtual machines are always available and also limit downtime. For example, a company selling products on the Internet can lose a lot of money if virtual web servers hosting the e-commerce website go down!

The High Availability (HA) feature in XenServer is designed to ensure your virtual machines are always available and have an optimal level of service within a resource pool.

When you enable HA in the pool, XenServer continually monitors the health of the hosts. If a host fails, virtual machines running on the failed host are automatically moved to another healthy host. Furthermore, if the failed host is the pool master, the High Availability feature is nominated automatically nominates another host as the new pool master so you can continue to manage the resource pool.

Virtual machines running on a host with HA enabled are known as protected...