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SAP applications are responsible for most business processes, and unplanned outages can represent a substantial loss in revenue. Customers require solutions with:
To ensure high availability and a minimal component failure rate, Dell Technologies recommends using components that have a high mean time between failure (MTBF).
This solution combines a redundant design, RAID for storage drives, dual controllers, and multiple paths to provide storage high availability. Multiple FC HBAs and switches connect to the solution infrastructure and the storage network, building resiliency in network connectivity and enabling systems to remain online and operational during component repair.
Because the solution is also virtualized, high availability is built in at the vSphere level to support both planned and unplanned downtime.
vSphere vMotion enables live migration of virtual machines (VMs) from ESXi server to ESXi server so that you can perform planned maintenance with zero application downtime. In addition, vSphere HA, which provides high availability for VMs, reduces unplanned downtime by using multiple vSphere ESXi hosts. The hosts are configured as a cluster to provide rapid recovery from outages and cost-effective high availability for applications that are running in VMs.
To ensure application availability, vSphere HA:
Because high availability protects all workloads, installing additional software within the application or VM is not necessary. After configuration, any VMs that are added to a cluster are automatically protected with no further action required.
vSphere HA is often used with vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT). Fault tolerance enables a VM to survive a physical server failure by creating an exact replica VM on another host that can take over at the time of failure. Fault tolerance provides protection for extremely critical VMs, where any loss of service is intolerable.
You can combine high availability with vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to protect against failures and provide load balancing across the hosts within a cluster.
The advantages of vSphere HA over traditional failover solutions include: