VMware HA is a leader in the industry and has created an elegant solution to solve the problem of failover at an affordable price. Typically, failover infrastructure is built on complex clustering solutions using expensive hardware. And due to the high price, the traditional solutions is available only to a small percentage of large corporations. VMware HA has implemented an innovative approach that accomplishes the same goal of failover at a reasonable cost, allowing the majority of businesses to take benefit from failover safety and high availability.

At the center of HA is the concept of separating the hardware from the application and OS. By creating a cluster of ESX hosts, the resources of each server is combined to form a resource pool. Virtual machines are created within the cluster where the hardware is separated from the guest OS by a layer of abstraction handled by the Hypervisor.

VMware HA deployed on clusters and resource pools provide a robust platform to host your business applications. VMware HA integrates with VMotion, VirtualCenter, and DRS to simplify provisioning of virtual machines, load balancing, resource allocation, and migration, while also providing a cost-effective, easy-to-use, failover solution for business applications running on virtual machines. Using VMware Infrastructure together with HA mitigate single points of failure for critical business applications running in a virtual environment. Virtualization itself provides an avenue for higher system utilization, a reduction of IT costs to reach business goals and priorities, and simplified administration of IT infrastructure.

Image depicting the sharing of resources of a single ESX server between two Virtual Machines