Cisco Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance 11.5 White Paper

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White Paper

VMware vSphere HA for Cisco Prime Collaboration

Introduction to High Availability

High availability (HA) is a system design approach that ensures specific applications or services are accessible at

an agreed upon level of performance for a specified period of time. Essentially, different design techniques are put

in place to ensure the application or service is up when it needs to be, minimizing downtime (the time the

application is unavailable).

HA Layers

Generically speaking, there are multiple layers at which HA can be implemented into a design. These layers may

include:

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The application layer: The application under consideration

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The OS layer: Linux server, Windows server, and so on

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The virtualization layer: Virtualization software

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The physical layer: Servers, networking infrastructure, storage infrastructure, and so on

This white paper covers recommendations for enabling HA at the virtualization layer for Cisco Prime

™

Collaboration. As such, while we will discuss basic hardware requirements for establishing HA utilizing VMware HA

in conjunction with Cisco Prime Collaboration 10.0, discussing HA at other layers is outside the scope of this paper.

Introduction to VMware vSphere HA

vSphere HA provides high availability and reduces downtime for virtualized applications by making use of multiple

hosts set up in a cluster configuration. This allows for relatively quick recovery from various types of outages that

may occur.

vSphere HA provides for application availability at the virtualization layer by:

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Reacting to hardware failures and network disruptions. When this occurs, it will restart the application on an

active host within the cluster.

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Detecting OS failures and monitoring virtual machines (VMs). When this occurs, it will restart the virtual

machine itself as required.

Details on vSphere HA can be found here:

vSphere HA Requirements

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All hosts must be licensed for vSphere HA

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There must be a minimum of two hosts in the cluster

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All hosts should either be configured with static IP addresses or the addresses must be persistent across

reboots if using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)