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Overview
SAP applications are responsible for most business processes, and any unplanned outages can represent a substantial loss in revenue. Customers require solutions with:
To ensure HA and a minimal component failure rate, Dell EMC recommends using components that have a high mean time between failure (MTBF).
The Ready Bundle for SAP Landscapes solution combines a redundant design, RAID for storage drives, dual controllers, and multiple paths to provide storage HA. 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 Ready Bundle for SAP Landscapes solution is also virtualized, HA 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 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 HA for applications that are running in VMs.
To ensure application availability, vSphere HA:
Because HA 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). FT 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. FT provides protection for extremely critical VMs, where any loss of service is intolerable.
You can combine HA 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: