Virtualization specialist and blogger Marcel van den Berg wrote a interesting blog post comparing high availability in VMware vSphere 5 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V with the title vSphere 5 versus Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: high available VMs. In his blog post he mentions VMware Fault Tolerance, which I think it is a good feature but there are some things you have to be aware of.
VMware vSphere includes a feature called “Fault Tolerance” which allows you to run a hot-standby Virtual Machine on an other VMware vSphere Hypervisor host, which will take over if the primary Virtual Machine fails.
This is a great feature but it also has some disadvantages, because you have to sacrifice on scale and features.
- No Memory Overcommit (Dynamic Memory)
- Only 1 vCPU per Fault Tolerance Virtual Machine
- Maximum 4 Fault Tolerance VMs per host
- No Snapshots
- Maximum of 64GB RAM
- IPv6 is not supported in VMware FT
- Virtual Machine cannot be replicated with the vSphere Replication (SRM 5)
- No Hot-plug support for virtual devices
- No Dynamic Resource Optimization
Now Microsoft does not offer a Fault Tolerance feature in Hyper-V. But offers besides the Hyper-V Failover Clustering some great virtual guest clustering capabilities. But if you need true Zero Fault Tolerance the Microsoft partner Stratus Technologies offers a great solution (ftserver) with a lot less disadvantages.
Pingback: Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V – Welcome to the Post-VMware Era! | Thomas Maurer (tm)