HA/FT Solution for patching?

[jcorbin121]

Is there a managable solution for applying monthly Microsoft securtiy bulletins within HA/FT features? Can I somehow (quickly) create a temporary VM clone while the original VM gets patched and restarts? If I were to set the VM as FT does a reboot activate the secondary FT VM? MSCS clusters are painful solution, we have implemented on DB and Web servers already, would like to move these servers to VM and looking for a no-downtime patching solution.

John

[Rumple]

You are not going to find a no downtime solution with either native MSCS or any vmware high availablilty solutions when it comes to patching.

With MSCS you have to failover the resources which incurs an outage.

With HA - that only causes the VM to restart if the host goes down

FT - The "ghost" VM thats running is an exact duplicate copy of the VM Memory (as a basic level) and as such they don't run like a cluster where you can modify the primary or secondary without affecting the partner.

Patching in the VM world is exactly like patching in the real world, with the added simplicity of rolling back "Most" changes if needed. Databases like Exchange, SQL, Oracle, and Active Directory being the exception.

[Josh26]

Regardless of the marketing hype anyone will give you, this comes down to your service providing the option.

You say you have DB and web servers.

SQL server offers live mirrors, which can be failed over without downtime. Web servers are easier - Windows NLB basically makes it just happen.

[depping]

HA/FT will not help you to avoid issues caused by Patching as with HA there's only 1 VM and with FT both VMs are sharing the same Disk!

There is no such solution(no downtime) from VMware unfortunately.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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