Avoiding downtime with VMware Fault Tolerance and High Availability

Last updated:July 2015

Essential Guide

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Editor's note

VMware's Fault Tolerance (FT) and High Availability (HA) are both focused on uptime and keeping virtual machines running. Once a company determines its uptime and data recovery needs, it can decide whether High Availability or Fault Tolerance is the better choice.

While Fault Tolerance is a high availability feature that can be used in a VMware HA cluster, there are meaningful differences between the two. Each requires a setup with different available resources and both have a different effect on virtual machines.

The resources presented in this guide to VMware FT and HA will help you understand your options with some real-world use cases to compare to your IT infrastructure and needs.

1Requirements

It's important to differentiate how High Availability and Fault Tolerance operate. If you can't afford to have interruption, Fault Tolerance instantly gets to work after a host failure. HA can get virtual machines back up and running with very little disturbance.

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