Arcserve High Availability Software
VMware System, Application and Data Availability

Differentiators:

Arcserve High Availability offers key differentiators when you compare it to high-availability solutions from VMware.

• VMware Fault Tolerance requires clustering architecture and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) requires a shared storage infrastructure for the DR site and the production environment. The production environment also requires shared, centralized storage, which is often connected to the SAN or iSCSI storage. All of these can be costly solutions.
  
  
  • Arcserve High Availability, enables implementation of a comprehensive data protection solution by using costeffective hardware and storage for the Replica servers.
    
    
• In this way, IT can avoid the need for expensive hardware clustering or shared storage infrastructure as a prerequisite. But of course, Arcserve High Availability can protect data on network attached storage (NAS) and SAN, too.
  
  
• With VMware vCenter Server SRM, monitoring of the virtual machines is performed at the ESX/Virtual Center level and only detects problems with the Virtual Machine operating system. When running a critical application such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, IIS, Oracle or BlackBerry, if the application fails, VMware SRM or Clustering would not detect a specific application or application service failure and therefore would not automatically fail over. To address this challenge, VMware now also offers VMware App HA.
  
  
  • Arcserve High Availability provides in-depth monitoring of the applications running on the VMs. It alerts IT to an application failure and you can set it to automatically fail over to the Replica server, or use push-button failover instead.
    
    
• With VMware SRM, when provisioning a VM from one machine to another, the image is cloned, so the new VM will have the same machine name and IP address as the failed VM. This works for failover, but introduces challenges when IT attempts to repair the problem that affected the Production VM. It makes it very difficult for IT to remotely access the Production VM to understand why it failed, troubleshoot the system, and restart the failed application.
  
  
• In Arcserve High Availability, failover occurs by redirecting the server traffic and users at the DNS server level. This means that no changes are made to any server configuration of the Production or Replica VMs during or after a failover. This also makes managing VMs off-site much easier because it is not necessary to create a virtual LAN to enable an IP address from your production subnet to work on the DR site (which is most likely on a different IP subnet).
  
  
• Data loss and corruption in a virtualized environment adds another level of challenge, typically because of the shared storage architecture that is used. If an application corrupts data, or a virus or malicious code makes changes to the data, no amount of provisioning between VMs will address the problem.
  
  
  • Arcserve High Availability includes a Data Rewind feature to provide continuous data protection (CDP) that enables fast and easy rewind back to a known, good point in time before data loss or damage, such as a database checkpoint. Data Rewind complements any periodic backup solution and helps IT organizations to meet demanding recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), reducing data loss.
    
    
• Even the most virtualization-savvy businesses and organizations maintain physical server environments. While VMware solutions can be used on VMware servers, most organizations need to protect their physical servers too, and many are also using or investigating other virtualization solutions such as Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
  
  
  • As we mentioned above, Arcserve High Availability protects both physical and virtual servers-including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer.
    
    
• VMware offers only snapshot-based DR testing for its own high-availability solution.
  
  
  • Arcserve High Availability includes Arcserve Assured Recovery for automated, non-disruptive testing that covers both physical and all virtual environments. It may be scheduled for daily, weekly or even hourly lights-out recovery testing of the application data running on your Replica server or VM for disaster recovery. This process also offers integrated VSS Snapshot management, so you can perform application-consistent tape-based or diskbased backups off the Replica server, avoiding impact to the production environment.

Other differentiators include:

• Built-in 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption over the network without requiring a virtual private network (VPN) or IPSec tunnel.
• Replication options (continuous and scheduled) to balance network resources with the required level of protection.
• Offline synchronization to speed deployment and protection for large Windows-based data sets and databases.
• Group failover used when protecting groups of servers or server farms for applications such as SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and websites. You can failover a group of servers together, even if only one server experiences trouble, to keep all component servers physically located together for application performance reasons.
• Multi-stream replication, which helps to speed the replication process over high-latency WANs.
• Amazon cloud (AWS/EC2) integration for Windows-based application and file server replication and failover using Amazon remote facilities and resources. Using the cloud can help you convert capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX) and reduce operation and maintenance requirements, while enabling better budget planning.

Deployments:

Arcserve High Availability Deployment

Documentation:

Download the Arcserve High Availability Solution Brief Data Sheet (PDF)