Went to a VMworld session "VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) for Multiprocessor Virtual Machines—Technical Preview and Best Practices (INF-BCO2655) which was a great session by the way. VMware release FT awhile back but it's current version has many short comings, one of which is no support for SMP virtual machines. FT to me so far has stood for Failed Technology because there were no workloads that warranted using it for me. I'm sure there are use causes but single processor virtual machines with a single point of failure on the storage side just wasn't something that lived up to the name.
Now that I have said how much I love the current and past versions of FT these recent session gave a preview of what could or could not be on the horizon. Get it Horizon? No they're not related. Just me and my poor humor. So in this tech preview a demo was shown of what could truly by called Fault Tolerance or FT. First there's multiprocessor support. Next, the primary and secondary FT virtual machines can be separated at the storage layer on different datastores. They did mention that a single datastore would be used similar to a witness disk in a Microsoft Cluster.
FT of this caliber is what I'm sure a lot of customers are wanting to see and would use. The only thing is that there is no release date if there ever is one. The demo proved that it works to a good degree so I can't see this not being released at some point. My fingers are crossed.
