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| High Availability / Components / Application Availability / Cluster / High Availability Cluster / SteelEye LifeKeeper / Linux ARKs / VMware Virtual Machine |
VMware Virtual Machine
The use of virtual servers to host business critical applications is expanding rapidly as IT organizations experience significant cost savings and optimize resource utilization through virtualization supported server consolidation. It is not well understood, however, that the use of virtualization technologies can decrease the availability of applications and services. The need for integrating an automated high availability clustering solution to monitor and protect the virtual servers becomes evident when the increased risk of failure is understood. The potential for application failure is increased due to two factors. First, virtualization increases the scope of failures as more applications and services are at risk given the failure of a single physical machine. If this consolidated server should suffer an outage, multiple applications and business services will be unavailable. Second, the primary causes of application outage are software related; the more complex the software stack being used by an application, the higher the risk of failure. The deployment of a virtualization layer increases software stack complexity and increases the risk of application outages. The VMware ESX Server Console OS is such a virtualization layer and provides a complete operating system running directly on the host machine physical hardware. From the resources of the host machine, the virtualization layer creates a pool of logical computing resources and allocates those resources to one or more virtual machines in which a standard operating system can run. LifeKeeper brings a complete high availability solution to virtual environments with fast and automatic failure event detection and recovery, comprehensive monitoring and recovery for individual applications and services and tremendous flexibility in building failover configurations from a mixture of physical and virtual machines, and either shared storage or data replication. LifeKeeper offers two approaches to High Availability when used with VMware ESX Server. LifeKeeper can run within a virtual machine and LifeKeeper for Linux VMware Virtual Machine Recovery Kit allows LifeKeeper to run within the VMware Console Operating System. LifeKeeper running within a virtual machineThe easiest and most flexible means of combining high availability clustering and virtualization is to run LifeKeeper within each virtual machine-just as in a physical system. This is possible if the OS running in the VM is Linux or Windows.
The example shows a 2-node cluster configuration, in which LifeKeeper is running in each virtual machine to manage individual applications and resources. In the event of a failure or a manual switchover request from an administrator, LifeKeeper can move applications between virtual machines, even to virtual machines hosted by a different physical system.
LifeKeeper running in the Console OSAs an alternative the LifeKeeper VMware Virtual Machine Recovery Kit (VMware ARK) is designed to allow LifeKeeper, when running within the VMware Virtual MachineServer Console OS, to manage individual virtual machines as protected resources, regardless of what guest operating system (Linux or Windows) is running inside the virtual machine. The recovery kit allows LifeKeeper to represent individual virtual machines as LifeKeeper resources, with the normal LifeKeeper capabilities, including monitoring, local recovery, failover, and switchover. The kit does not provide any capability for managing individual applications and resources running inside the virtual machine. To achieve that level of high availability management in a VMware environment, the solution of running LifeKeeper inside the individual virtual machines should be used instead.
The example shows a 2-node cluster configuration, in which LifeKeeper is running in the Console OS on both of the physical machines. The VMware ARK is being used to allow LifeKeeper to manage and protect each of the active virtual machines. In the event of a failure or a manual switchover request from an administrator, LifeKeeper can move either of the virtual machines to the other physical system. Key Features
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