VCP-VMC 1.10: Highly Available and Resilient Infrastructure
Overview
Overview
High availability (HA) and resilience are key components of a successful VMware Cloud infrastructure. HA and resilience are achieved by utilizing a combination of redundant hardware, load balancing, failover mechanisms, and third-party tools and solutions. This article will discuss the key components of a highly available and resilient infrastructure, how these components are implemented in VMware Cloud, and will provide use cases for HA and resilience in a VMware Cloud environment.
High Availability
High availability (HA) is a system design approach and associated service implementation that ensures a certain level of operational performance and quality of service for a given system. It is achieved through the use of redundant components, which are used to provide a failover capability in the event of a system failure. This means that in the event of a failure, the system will still be available and operational, and can quickly and automatically switch over to the redundant system without any service interruption.
Key Components of a High Availability Infrastructure
High availability is achieved by using a combination of redundant hardware, load balancing, and failover mechanisms.
Redundant Hardware
Redundant hardware refers to the use of multiple, redundant components in a system. This includes redundant servers, storage devices, and networking components. This ensures that if one component fails, the other components can take over and ensure continuous operation.
Load Balancing
Load balancing is the process of distributing workloads across multiple processing resources in order to maximize resource utilization and minimize response time. Load balancing helps ensure that the system can handle large amounts of traffic and requests without becoming overwhelmed.
Failover Mechanisms
Failover mechanisms are processes by which a system can quickly and automatically switch over to a redundant system in the event of a system failure. This ensures that the system remains available and operational, even in the event of a system failure.
How High Availability is Implemented in VMware Cloud
High availability is a critical component of the VMware Cloud platform. VMware provides several tools and solutions to ensure the highest level of availability and resilience for your cloud infrastructure.
VMware vSphere HA
VMware vSphere HA is a cluster-based feature that provides high availability for virtual machines by quickly restarting them on alternate hosts in the event of a host failure.
VMware vSphere DRS
VMware vSphere DRS allows you to balance the load across multiple hosts and ensure optimal resource utilization.
Third-Party Tools and Solutions
VMware also provides a number of third-party tools and solutions to further enhance the availability and resilience of your cloud infrastructure. These include solutions such as backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and data replication.
Redundancy
Redundancy is a concept in which multiple copies of data or components are included in an infrastructure to provide fault tolerance and business continuity. Redundancy helps to ensure that if a single component fails, the system can still operate with minimal downtime.
Key components of a resilient infrastructure
Redundant power and cooling
To ensure the availability of critical systems and components, redundant power and cooling systems should be in place. This includes having multiple power supplies, power distribution units, and cooling systems that are ready to kick in if one fails.
Network redundancy
Having redundant network connections allows for uninterrupted access to services or applications. This includes having multiple routers, switches, and firewalls in place to ensure that the system can still operate in the event of a single component failure.
Data backup and recovery
Having a reliable backup and recovery plan in place is essential for any highly available and resilient infrastructure. This includes having a backup plan for both software and hardware components, as well as a recovery plan to ensure that the system can be restored quickly in the event of an outage.
Multi-cloud enables redundancy
As you are reading these key components of a resilient infrastructure, you are probably thinking something like "these things are why I am using hyperscalers, so I don't have to deal with it!" Implementing a multi-cloud strategy by it's own nature helps enable redundant power and cooling and network redundancy. Think about it -- the very nature of Availability Zones and the potential to utilize Stretched Clusters to take workloads and stretch them across multiple physical discrete locations is stronger redundancy than many organizations have in their own data centers or colos.
Data recovery is a different story though. While it varies depending on which hyperscaler you utilize, VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware take responsibility for your physical infrastructure, your network underlay (Nitro), and the accessibility of native cloud resources, the SLA for that service states that you are responsible for all of your workloads, data, and yes, backing that data up!
How resilience is implemented in VMware Cloud
VMware Site Recovery
VMware Site Recovery is a Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) tool used to automate disaster recovery and enable the replication of virtual machines between different sites. It also provides automated failover and failback capabilities, making it easy to ensure that systems can be quickly recovered in the event of an outage. You may be familiar with the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) which is the on-premises version of this solution.
VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery
VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) increases resilience in a multicloud strategy by offering an on-demand disaster recovery service that is delivered as an easy-to-use SaaS solution. VCDR replicates virtual machines, both on-premises and on VMware Cloud on AWS, to the cloud and recovers them to a VMware Cloud on AWS Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). This makes it easy to protect against potential disasters and keeps disaster recovery costs under control while maintaining a robust multicloud strategy.
VMware vSphere Replication
VMware vSphere Replication is a tool used to replicate virtual machines between different sites. It also provides automated failover and failback capabilities, making it easy to ensure that systems can be quickly recovered in the event of an outage.
Third-party solutions and tools
There are a number of third-party solutions and tools available to help implement redundancy in a VMware Cloud environment. Many of these tools can connect into native cloud resources, like AWS S3 buckets or Azure Blobs, to keep data transfer in their respective hyperscaler networks. These solutions and tools can help to ensure that systems are highly available and resilient, and can provide additional features such as automated failover and replication.
Use cases for high availability and resilience in VMware Cloud
Application and services availability
High availability and resilience in VMware Cloud is essential for ensuring that applications and services remain available and accessible to end users. Utilizing a combination of technologies such as vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSAN, Site Recovery (SR), and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) can ensure that applications and services remain available and accessible even during times of outages or unplanned downtime.
Disaster recovery and business continuity
High availability and resilience in VMware Cloud is also essential for ensuring that business operations can continue even in the event of a disaster or other major disruption. Utilizing technologies such as SRM and vSAN can provide the ability to quickly failover to a secondary site in the event of a disaster, ensuring that critical operations can continue without disruption.
Maintenance and upgrades
High availability and resilience in VMware Cloud also provides the ability to perform maintenance and upgrades without disrupting services. Utilizing technologies such as vSphere HA and vSphere FT, maintenance and upgrades can be performed without affecting service availability, ensuring that services remain available and accessible even during times of maintenance and upgrades.
Final Thoughts
High availability and resilience in VMware Cloud is essential for ensuring that applications and services remain available and accessible to end users, even during times of outages or unplanned downtime. Utilizing a combination of technologies such as vSphere HA, vSphere FT, vSphere DRS, vSAN and SRM can provide the ability to quickly failover to a secondary site in the event of a disaster, as well as performing maintenance and upgrades without disruption.
Implementing these technologies in a VMware Cloud environment is essential for ensuring that applications and services remain available and accessible to end users, even in the event of a disaster or other major disruption. Additionally, these technologies provide the ability to perform maintenance and upgrades without disrupting services, ensuring that services remain available and accessible even during times of maintenance and upgrades.
It is important to ensure that your environment is properly configured to take advantage of the High Availability and Resiliency features available in VMware Cloud. Additionally, it is important to ensure that your environment is properly monitored and maintained, as well as having a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure that critical operations can continue even in the event of a disaster or other major disruption. Properly configuring and maintaining your VMware Cloud environment, as well as having a disaster recovery plan in place, will help to ensure that your environment is highly available and resilient.