What Is VMware High Availability (VMware HA)?

If you've ever wondered how to make your virtualized environment more like the real thing, VMware High Availability is your feature. You will not know how great it is until you have it. High Availability ensures that your virtualized environment stays up and running even if there are issues with the host server or its network connection. It does this by having a standby host ready to take over if needed. High Availability will automatically transfer control to the standby host if your host goes down. It means there's no need to have dedicated standby hardware and software for your virtualized computing environment High Availability takes care of it all! VMware High Availability is a utility feature found in VMware vSphere, effectively eliminating the need for dedicated standby hardware and software for a virtualized computing environment. The main idea is that you have two or more virtual machines running on the same host, then if one of those virtual machines fails, another one takes over its responsibilities. This way, you can maintain high Availability without purchasing an expensive service that is only used during the installation of new software or after a failure occurs. Furthermore, this feature allows you to configure failover between two ESXi hosts in case of a power outage or network outage. We've all been there. You've got the perfect plan for a high-availability environment, with the primary and secondary nodes in the right spots. Yet then you realize that you'll have to manually configure every single node with its position and role, and it just seems like too much work. But wait! There's good news! With VMware High Availability, you can forget all that planning nonsense, and just let our master-slave node relationship model take care of everything for you!