Do you have control over your virtualized environment?
It is imperative that the Lotus Renault GP F1 Team has 24x7 availability to all of its applications. If the team lost access to IT during a race, it would be driving blind. To ensure that doesn’t happen, the Lotus F1 team turned to its long-standing technology partner, Symantec. The team implemented Symantec ApplicationHA to gain visibility into its VMware environment. ApplicationHA provides the Lotus F1 team with granular control of all its applications, delivering 99.99% availability. For more information about how the Lotus F1 Team is using ApplicationHA in its VMware environment check out this video: http://bit.ly/O3ixps.

I have been working for Symantec for more years than I care to remember. I joined through the Veritas acquisition some 6 years ago. In that time the datacenter has changed incredibly, before joining Veritas I was a systems administrator, this was long before the concept of SANs were mainstream and most UNIX systems simply had direct attached storage. I think it’s fair to say that at some point over the past 10 years the datacenter began transitioning from physical to virtual and we at Symantec were very guilty of not adapting our solutions quickly enough. We went on selling our traditional clustering and storage management tools which while they have always been best of breed weren’t necessarily a good fit in virtual environments. Thankfully due to the strength of our portfolio our product team began to reinvest into adapting our solutions specifically into the virtual space. The upshot is now although there is still much development and innovation under way we have a...

Environment

Two ESXi Servers = Esxi1 and Esxi2

version of Esxi Servers = 5.0

Vcenter OS = Windows2008R2(64bit)

SAN = iscsi SAN attached on both Esxi Servers

HA and DRS = enabled

Application HA = 5.1 SP2

Application HA OS = rhel 5.6 (64bit)

Application name = sshd

Problem

I was facing the subjected error while configuring the Application under Symantec Application  HA. See the below snap as a reference:

Solution

There may be other culprits but in my case there were two things which was occuring.

1.) initially I was trying to configure Symantec Application HA on a OS which was configured as vmware FT. On the vmware FT this will not be applicable as per my understanding because...

A funny thing happened the other day when I went to one of my favorite sites to look up a word...I saw the above message, but looking at the redirect URL, it says "failover-namechangedtoprotecttheinnocent.com". Now, far be it from me to be correcting the vocabulary of a site whose stock in trade is word definitions, but in the high availability biz, that is NOT what we mean by "failover". A failover is when you have a service under HA cluster control, and in the event of a failure, that service is relocated to another server in the cluster. In its entirety.

Clearly there was some attempt made at protecting the service, otherwise my browser would have just thrown an error saying the site wasn't available. But it's just as clear that protection wasn't extended to the entire business service. We...