In the previous chapter, we learnt how to manage and monitor resources on the virtual infrastructure, and how to achieve their maximum utilization. We now know how to effectively manage available resources and ways to monitor their performance, and how to trigger alarms in case of a resource failure or any event.

This chapter will explain the three most crucial and critical aspects of the virtual environments. The chapter begins with gaining understanding of High Availability (HA) and getting familiar with its configuration procedures, and then moves forward to Fault Tolerance (FT) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). DRS, Storage DRS, and management of DRS clusters play a very important role in managing the whole data center. Often to reap benefits of the complete infrastructure to its maximum potential, HA and DRS are used together.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: