Vmware HA vs Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 HA

[aiea96701]

I saw something yesterday that floored me. I saw a demo of Windows 2008 R2 HA and when the individual shutdown one of the Windows hosts the VMs migrated instantly over to the other hosts in the CSV cluster w/o any downtime. This is significantly different than VMware HA where the VMs are "restarted" on other hosts.

The reason I bring this up is because I was told at VMworld that Vmware HA is superior to Microsofts Windows HA. This doesn't look like it. Or, is this a recent development for Microsoft?

[depping]

VMware HA restarts the VM indeed. VMware FT shadows the VM and has a seamless failover but is limited to 1vCPU.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCDX

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Soon to be release: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS deepdive (end of November through Amazon.com)

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[a_p_]

Just curious.

... when the individual shutdown one of the Windows hosts the VMs migrated instantly over to the other hosts in the CSV cluster w/o any downtime

Was this a clean shut down or a "hard" switch off of the server (by e.g pulling the power cord)?

If it was a clean shutdown, then I assume the migration was triggered by the shutdown process (like DRS in VMware)

Where did you see this? Maybe you can add a link.

André

[admin]

What you saw is what vmware calls maintenance mode, available with drs, and is not the equivalent of ha. HA protects against unplanned server failures, not a planned shutdown of the server, which is what you saw. There is no way to move a vm with no downtime during a failure unless it is running somewhere else, like with fault tolerance.

The maintenance mode capability has been available from vmware since at least 2007 with VI 3.5.

[aiea96701]

Thanks. I am at an offsite location with a coworker. We're working on a different project. I had the individual demo again and this time I saw that he "manually" shutdown the host....he didn't pull the plug. I was misled.

Thanks. My faith is restored in VMware. He was trying to prove that hyper-v was better and he was "saying" that MS HA was better than VMware HA. I advised him that his terms were incorrect.

[js411]

While maybe not a popular comment on this board... Windows HA is superior in many ways over VMware HA. It has more extensive health detection, faster failover, provides resiliency from more scenarios, and things like CSV provide fault tolerance from storage connection failures. There is also a big arguement that you don't have to learn two different HA technologies... you can use the same solution to make VM's HA... or SQL, Exchange, File, etc... HA. Even in VMware's own doc's they clearly state their HA story is only focused at basic scenarios of complete server failures.

[depping]

Sorry, I seriously disagree here. If you can enable HA in 4 clicks you are not telling me you have to learn something new. On top of that VMFS is usually highly redundant and you can create more redundancy in terms of networking / storage by architecting your environment/infrastructure correctly.

On top of that HA offers a VM/Guest Lever protection through VM Monitoring and even an App Level protection through App Monitoring and if that isn't enough you can enable FT on your VM. Not sure about Hyper-V but I am pretty certain that they don't have most of these capabilities!

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCDX

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Soon to be release: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS deepdive (end of November through Amazon.com)

Blogging: | Twitter: