Symantec ApplicationHA for Hyper-V

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Failover Clustering articles.

In previous blogs I had discussed the Failover Clustering VM Monitoring feature adding in Windows Server 2012. You can find these blogs here and here . Below is a guest blog describing Symantec ApplicationHA for Hyper-V which leverages the functionality provided by VM Monitoring.

Hi my name is Lorenzo Galelli, Senior Technical Product Manager at Symantec Corporation, here to talk about some exciting technologies from Symantec that focuses on Hyper-V and Failover Clustering. Before I jump into those new technologies I just wanted to say thanks to the Clustering and High Availability Windows team for the invite to write on their blog, thanks guys!

So let’s talks about the new and exciting technologies that I am sure will make your job easier when deploying applications within Hyper-V. ApplicationHA is the first technology that I would like to showcase, its actually been around for a couple of years providing application uptime on other hypervisors and with the release of our new version we have added support for Hyper-V running within Windows 2012 and Windows 2012 R2. So what’s so great about ApplicationHA I hear you ask, well a number of things. First, it monitors your applications running within the virtual machines and automatically remediates any faults that occur by trying to restart those. Second, it integrates with Failover Clustering specifically the heartbeat service and leverages a common set of APIs that we can hook into to assist remediation tasks. Also we removed a lot of the headaches revolving around configuration of availability where ApplicationHA will auto discover the majority of the application configuration so all that the admin needs to do is to decide what needs monitoring and with a couple clicks through the configuration wizard your all set. We also provide management and operations through a web interface and plan to have SCVMM extensibility in the coming release. So if you’re virtualizing SharePoint, Exchange, SQL, IIS, SAP or Oracle then we have a wizard to support that app along with many others as well as support for custom or in house applications.

Below is a diagram that explains how ApplicationHA for Hyper-V leverages the Microsoft Failover Cluster Heartbeat service which Microsoft added to Windows 2012, ApplicationHA leverages this heartbeat function to communicate with Failover Cluster that a heartbeat fault has occurred if ApplicationHA is unable to restart the application within the virtual machine, ApplicationHA will attempt to remediate the fault a number of times before it communicates with the heartbeat service.

1. Microsoft Failover Cluster detects issues with virtual machines if faults occur and moves the effected VM.


2. ApplicationHA detects issues with the application under control and attempts to restart the faulted application.


3. In the event that ApplicationHA is unable to start the application it instructs a heartbeat fault with Failover Cluster.


4. Failover Cluster reboots the VM or moves the VM to another host if the application still has issues starting.

For more information on ApplicationHA 6.1 for Hyper-V be sure to check out the new whitepaper which describes in detail how ApplicationHA works with Failover Cluster. http://www.symantec.com/connect/sites/default/files/White_Paper_Confidently_Virtualize_Business-critical_Applications_in_Microsoft_Hyper-V_with_Symantec_ApplicationHA.pdf

For more information on Symantec ApplicationHA be sure to check out the Symantec ApplicationHA website http://www.symantec.com/application-ha

Next up is Virtual Business Service which is an application availability multi-tier orchestration tool which provides the ability to link applications together and control those as a single entity. Applications can be hosted on physical as well as virtual machines and as long as the application is using Symantec availability solution like ApplicationHA or Microsoft Failover Clustering then you’re good to go.

If you want to review this capability in more detail I have posted a number of videos on Symantec User Group Forum, Symantec Connect which walks through the installation and configuration from start to finish.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/videos/applicationha-61-hyper-v-install-configure-and-manage-part-1

http://www.symantec.com/connect/videos/applicationha-61-hyper-v-install-configure-and-manage-part-2

http://www.symantec.com/connect/videos/applicationha-61-hyper-v-install-configure-and-manage-part-3

http://www.symantec.com/connect/videos/applicationha-61-hyper-v-install-configure-and-manage-part-4