Application Versus Infrastructure-Level High Availability with vSAN in VMware Cloud Foundation

Accommodating for Failure Availability and Recovery of Applications and Data The Evolution of Options in High Availability Application-Level High Availability for Apps and Data Infrastructure-Level High Availability for Apps and Data Different Approaches to Achieve Data Consistency Differences in Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) Which One is Right for You? Summary Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Government-Ready NVIDIA AI Enterprise Containers Now Available for Customers of VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA Application Versus Infrastructure-Level High Availability with vSAN in VMware Cloud Foundation The FinOps Journey: From Visibility to Business Value Maintaining availability of data and the applications that produce or consume that data might be the most important responsibility of data center administrators. Capabilities like high performance or special data services mean very little if the applications and the data they produce or consume is not readily available. Ensuring availability is a complex topic, as application availability and data availability use different techniques to achieve the desired result. Sometimes availability requirements are achieved using infrastructure-level mechanisms, while others may use application-centric solutions. What is best for your environment depends heavily on the requirements and capabilities of your infrastructure. While VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can deliver high levels of data and application availability in a simple way , this post will look at the differences in providing high availability of applications and data using application-level technologies versus inherent infrastructure-level technologies in VCF. We will also look at how VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) can play a part in simplifying some of these decisions. Protecting applications and data require an understanding of what typical failures look like, and what a system can do to accommodate for failure. For example, failures in a physical infrastructure may include: Centralized storage solutions like storage arrays Discrete storage devices in distributed solutions Hosts Network interface cards (NICs) Network switching fabrics, causing partitions Site/zone-level failures Failures like these noted above could impact the data, the applications, or both. Failures come in a variety of ways, with some explicitly identified, while others only through absence. Some failures are temporary, while others permanent. Solutions must be sophisticated enough to automatically handle these failure and recovery scenarios.