Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines

August 01, 2008, 1:00 a.m. EDT 3 Min Read

Intense competition and high rewards for innovation make the financial services industry one of the biggest and most aggressive adopters of new technology; so it’s no surprise that financials have been leading adopters of virtualization technology. The benefits for financial firms that have deployed server virtualization include lower capital and operating expenses, better resource utilization, and greater flexibility to meet changing business needs.

But these same companies demand rock-solid reliability from their IT infrastructure because downtime can result in huge financial losses, escalated regulatory risk, ratings downgrades and major damage to the company’s brand. As financial service companies deploy virtualization they are discovering that this technology is a double-edged sword when it comes to managing downtime risk.

So how do you protect internet e-banking, messaging and other financial services applications against failures without the complexity and interruptions of failover processes? True availability requires fault tolerant-class capabilities to deliver continuous computing, even when failures occur. Fault tolerance-class means that if something should break, the operating environment and associated applications don’t stop—not even briefly. Failing over every time a failure occurs is costly in terms of data, time, and application availability. Failing out a failed device maintains continuity of operations. This provides a proactive approach to enable continuous availability, unlike reactive failover/restart techniques.

Fault tolerant-class software for virtual environments transparently combines and manages the resources of two virtual machines running on different servers in a virtual resource pool to create a single protected virtual machine environment. The protected virtual machine appears and is managed just like a standard Windows server. Disk data is mirrored synchronously to redundant storage and network and server operations are protected from failure. The administrator loads and configures the application in the protected virtual machine as though it was being loaded onto a physical server.

If a fault or failure occurs in a disk, network device or host system, fault tolerant-class software can automatically reconfigure resources to permit the application to continue operating without interruption or loss of client connectivity. Failure recovery is always reliable—with active redundancy the system is constantly validating itself because the two virtual machines comprising the protected environment continuously execute the same application operations. This unique architecture assures the availability and correct operation of system resources when they are needed in the event of a failure.

Fault tolerant-class virtual machines allow financial institutions to gain the benefits of server consolidation without the server being the single point of failure for multiple applications. FT-class availability brings the benefits of virtualization to business critical applications that firms were afraid to virtualize previously because of reliability concerns. And because this new approach reduces the cost and complexity of protecting virtual machines, applications that aren’t protected today — but should be — can now be protected. The end result: server virtualization can now be adopted for a much broader range of applications, including key customer-facing applications such as internet banking and online trading.

For financial institutions looking to virtualization to achieve better IT resource utilization, reduced data center costs and business agility, the issue of rock-solid availability for virtual environments is now being addressed.