An introduction to VMware AppHA

This post is part of a series of blogpostings on VMworld 2013 announcements. See here for a complete overview of all announcements.

In VMware vSphere 5,5 VMware introduced a new feature called AppHA. AppHA is part of VMware HA and monitors the status of services running in the guest. This is done using vFabric Hyperic agents which needs to be installed in each guest. Also you need a AppHA virtual applance and a Hyperic server

 vSphere App HA provide application aware high availability. While vSphere HA provides protect your application, it is not application aware and cannot detect and remediate software failures. vSphere App HA provides application protection by detecting application availability issues and automatically remediating them.

It is possible to set policies like:

• When the applications fails, restart the application service
• If the service restart fails, reset the VM
• Trigger a vCenter Server alarm
• Send an email notification

Main features

1. Autodiscover application services and their availability status
2. Simple 3 click creation of remediation policies
3. Safe VM restart (through HA API) of VMs in case of application restart failure
4. Integration with VC alarms to provide visibility to application downtime

The services supported by vSphere App HA are limited at the moment:

• MSSQL 2005, 2008, 2008R2, 2012
• Tomcat 6.0, 7.0
• TC Server Runtime 6.0, 7.0
• IIS 6.0, 7.0, 8.0
• Apache HTTP Server 1.3, 2.0, 2.2

This post is part of a series of blogpostings on VMworld 2013 announcements. See here for a complete overview of all announcements.