Goodbye vSphere AppHA, you were just not up to the job, enter Symantec ApplicationHA to the rescue

Well I thought this day would come eventually but I am surprised to see it so soon, its official folks. vSphere AppHA is no more as of vSphere 6.0, the official announcement is here . With the effort that’s required to provide continual support for old and new applications and also having to provide continual support for their updates it looks like the task was not something that VMware wanted to focus on. Don’t think that your covered though with backups, replication, vSphere HA or vSphere FT, non of those will get your application back up and running automatically should it fail.

don’t worry though

Symantec ApplicationHA comes to the rescue…..

As one of the first third party vendors providing support for application availability within virtual machines, Symantec has always been at the forefront providing resilience for applications running within VMware vSphere. ApplicationHA is one solution that has been doing this, and for the past four years its been going from strength to strength adding functionality and automation and importantly, resilience for mission critical applications that enables our customers to sleep at night. If your unfamiliar with Symantec ApplicationHA take a look at this comparison which I made a while back, its very detailed but will give you an insight of ApplicationHA’s true potential. Its inexpensive and doesn’t need vSphere Enterprise Plus to work. Its stable mature technology built on Veritas Cluster Server heritage. The development effort required to keep on top of platform and application updates is a challenge but it’s worth it, after all it’s the applications that drive your business and providing resilience for them should be top of mind.

More info on Symantec Application can be found here there’s also a free trial that you can test drive for 60 days if you like too.

Providing high availability and disaster recovery for virtualized SAP within VMware the right way

Over the past couple of years I have been getting more and more involved in SAP architecture designs for HA and DR and one on my pet hates at the start of my journey was the lack of basic information on what the SAP components were for and how they interacted with each other, it was a hard slog, for those who are venturing into SAP or even those hardened SAP veterans out there the paper below covers SAP in great detail and more importantly covers how SAP deployments should be done correctly especially when high availability and disaster recovery is a requirement.

Many organizations rely on SAP applications to support vital business processes. Any disruption of these services translates directly into bottom-line losses. As organization’s information systems become increasingly integrated and interdependent, the potential impact of failures and outages grows to enormous proportions.

The challenge for IT organizations is to maintain continuous SAP application availability in a complex, interconnected, and heterogeneous  application environment. The difficulties are significant:

• there are many potential points of failure or disruption
• the interdependencies between components complicates administration
• the infrastructure itself undergoes constant change

To gain additional competitive advantage, enterprises must now work more closely together and integrate their SAP environment with those of other organizations, such as partners, customers, or suppliers. The availability of these applications is therefore essential.

There are three main availability classes, depending on the degree of availability required:

• Standard Availability – achievable availability without additional measures
• High Availability – increased availability after elimination of single points of failure within the local datacenter
• Disaster Recovery – highest availability, which even overcomes the failure of an entire production site

Symantec helps the organizations that rely on SAP applications with an integrated, out-of-the-box solution for SAP availability. Symantec’s High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for SAP enhance both local and global availability for business critical SAP applications.

Local high availability: By clustering critical application components with application-specific monitoring and failover, Symantec’s solutions simplify the management of complex environments. Administrators can manually move services for preventative and proactive maintenance, and the software automatically migrates and restarts applications in case of failures.

Global availability/disaster recovery: By replicating data across geographically dispersed data centers and using global failover capabilities, companies can provide access to essential services in the event of major site disruptions. Using Symantec’s solutions, administrators can migrate applications or an entire data center within minutes, with a single click through a central console. Symantec’s flexible, hardware independent solutions support a variety of cost-effective strategies for leveraging your investment in disaster recovery resources.

Symantec provides High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for SAP, utilizing Symantec™ Storage Foundation, powered by Veritas, Symantec™ Replicator Option, Symantec™ Cluster Server, powered by Veritas, and Cluster Server agents that are designed specifically for SAP applications. The result is an out-of-the-box solution that you can quickly deploy to protect critical SAP applications immediately from either planned or unplanned downtime.

Download the full white paper below.

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