One of the hottest topics in today’s IT corridors revolves around the uses and benefits of hardware virtualization technologies. IT administrators everywhere are implementing virtualization for a variety of business needs, most notably server consolidation and rapid system provisioning.

However with each application that moves to a virtual server, new risks for application continuity occur. Maintaining continuous availability through the migration process, across application issues after virtualization and through external events such as disasters requires careful consideration to processes and supporting architectures.

Using Neverfail as an integral part of your virtualization strategy delivers Continuous Availability throughout your virtualization projects:

• Implement Neverfail to protect your mission critical applications with secondary servers on virtual machines.
• Test physical to virtual migration through seamless switch over. If there are issues simply switchback.
• When satisfied with performance switchover mission-critical applications to the virtual server permanently.
• Provide Disaster Recovery by deploying secondary servers offsite with WAN optimized protection.

Using Neverfail as part of your virtualization project will keep applications running during planned migration, allow extensive testing and provide off-site disaster recovery protection with bandwidth optimization without expensive storage technologies.

Neverfail for VMware® VirtualCenter

VMware VirtualCenter is an essential tool in the management of complex virtual infrastructures. Everything from VMware VMotion® provisioning to VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) optimization depends on VMware VirtualCenter availability. Centralized management, monitoring and higher levels of security also depend on VirtualCenter.

As a single point of control it is essential that VirtualCenter is continuously available and protected against hardware failures, configuration issues and disaster situations. In fact, keeping VirtualCenter available through any type of outage should be a high priority to ensure maximum return on investment for your virtual infrastructure. Further, planned maintenance and development and testing environments all require that VirtualCenter remains continuously available.

Neverfail for VMware® VirtualCenter is the only continuous availability solution designed to automatically protect your VirtualCenter management environment, including License Server. It clones, and then continuously replicates, configuration settings, data and the SQL Server databases to ensure that a consistent, up-to-date copy of VMware VirtualCenter is maintained on a secondary server.

Neverfail then proactively monitors VirtualCenter to predict risks to availability. Risk factors include services becoming unavailable, performance degradation, operating system failures and total machine failures. When an outage is unavoidable, Neverfail automatically switches VirtualCenter control to a secondary machine. There is no interruption to the management and control operations offered by VirtualCenter, virtual infrastructure management policies simply continue to run delivering maximum quality of service to end-user applications.

Related Resources

Aberdeen report - Are You Protected? Virtualization and Business Continuity

Neverfail Solutions for VMware®