Sam Routledge's Blog

I was fortunate enough, just before Christmas, to be invited to play with a new product coming soon from Neverfail, vAppHA. I’ve been hearing about this for a while, and it was great to see it actually working.

Neverfail have had a great partnership with VMware for some time (VMware’s vCenter Heartbeat is actually Neverfail for vCenter!), and vAppHA looks like it will extend this. We’ve been deploying VMware for about four years now, typically as much to improve availability as to consolidate physical servers. We’re great fans of the built-in high-availability features within VMware.

However, as good as VMware HA, vMotion and FT are, they don’t have very much in the way of application awareness. This is where vAppHA steps in. It uses Neverfail’s application aware technology, and uses the information garnered from that to trigger VMware events – making HA for example a much better bet for applicaion availability.

Envisage, for example, a SQL server running as a virtual machine. If a service stops, VMware unfortunately will be blissfully unaware. However, vAppHA recognises this and will the trigger an event of your chosing – for example, the restart of that virtual machine on another host. This provides a layer of ‘self-healing’ within your virtual infrastructure, up to the application layer, that didn’t exist before.

Coupled with an intelligent storage layer such as HP LeftHand which will enable you to stretch your VMware cluster over two sites on the same campus, this could be even more useful. It’s certainly something we’re looking forward to having in our kit-bag once it’s released to the world. For what it’s worth the pricing looks pretty fair too.

UPDATE (1/3/2010): Free trial now available here: http://www.neverfailgroup.com/virtualization/vapphatrial.html

This entry was posted on January 6, 2010 at 11:40 am and is filed under DR/BC/HA, Virtualisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.