Virtualization: A Solution for
High Availability
Mukesh Chandra Negi1,* and Dr. D.K. Pandey2
1,*Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science, JJTU, Rajasthan
2Director, Dr. Pandey Professional College, Ghaziabad
Virtualization is a technique where a physical server can be divided into multiple virtual servers and each server has its own resources like RAM, CPU, Disk Storage etc. initially the concept of virtualization was initiated specific in the terms of Hardware but later it has got great success in term of Software’s also. There are lots of benefits of hardware as well software virtualization specifically in the field of information technology. Such benefits are like cost saving in terms of infrastructure cost, Labor cost, Hardware cost, Software cost, Space cost, Failover capabilities in case of hardware as well as software failure, reduced the downtime of the production application and most importantly its very helpful in case of any planned or unplanned outages. Since the applications running on production environment has demand the high availability to serve the client requests 24*7, so it’s necessary to minimize the downtime of any planned or unplanned outages as well provide the failover capabilities to minimize the un planned outages. Virtualization is a perfect solution for such an environment where great high availability demanded although still few problems and limitations are there those need to rectify in the future to make it widely accepted by all of the organizations specifically in term of Information Technology. Few of the current issues are like there is no proper way to know the failure of the primary machine because the synch between primary and secondary backup machine can be break due to n number of reasons like due to some network latency or missing of heartbeats due to certain reasons etc. sometimes secondary backup machine did not able to recognize the failure of primary machine due to partial services failure and failover concept didn’t work properly. Apart from that in case of outage of a particular shared resource like shared drive between n numbers of virtual machines impacted the functionality of all of the machines. Still lots of research works have been going on in the same to find out a pure error free virtualization platform.
Keywords: Availability, Virtualization, Load balancing, Failover, recovery, outages, cluster.
