Systems and methods of high availability cluster environment failover protection
View Patent ↗A transparent high-availability solution utilizing virtualization technology is presented. A cluster environment and management thereof is implemented through an automated installation and setup procedure resulting in a cluster acting as a single system. The cluster is setup in an isolated virtual machine on each of a number of physical nodes of the system. Customer applications are run within separate application virtual machines on one physical node at a time and are run independently and unaware of their configuration as part of a high-availability cluster. Upon detection of a failure, traffic is rerouted through a redundant node and the application virtual machines are migrated from the failing node to another node using live migration techniques.
1. A fault tolerant computer system comprising:
a first processor system configured to run a first plurality of virtual machines;
a second processor system configured to run a second plurality of virtual machines;
a private network, the first processor system and the second processor system in communication via the private network;
a business network, the first processor system and the second processor system in communication via the business network; and
a system manager adapted to monitor operation of the first and second processor systems and the respective pluralities of virtual machines and to (i) migrate one or more of the respective virtual machines from the first processor system to the second processor system in response to an error in the first processor system, or (ii) migrate one or more of the respective virtual machines from the second processor system to the first processor system in response to an error in the second processor system.
2. The system of claim 1 further comprising a first local disk in communication with the first processor system and a second local disk in communication with the second processor system.
3. The system of claim 2 wherein the first local disk and the second local disk are arranged in a RAID-1 configuration.
4. The system of claim 1 wherein the error is one of an actual error or a predicted error.
5. The system of claim 1 wherein a system manager of the first processor system is moved to the second processor system in response to the error.
6. The system of claim 1 wherein the system manager is adapted to restart one of the first or second processor systems in response to the error, the restart clearing the error.
7. The system of claim 1 wherein the error is one of a loss-of-link error, a quality of service error and a business connectivity error.
8. A method of maintaining communication in a fault tolerant computer system comprising at least two processor systems configured to run a plurality of virtual machines and a system manager, a private network and a business network, the at least two processor systems in communication with the private network and the business network, the method comprising:
monitoring the operation of the first and second processor systems;
detecting in the system manager an error in one of the first and second processor systems; and
migrating one or more of the respective virtual machines from the first processor system to the second processor system in response to an error in the first processor system, or migrating one or more of the respective virtual machines from the second processor system to the first processor system in response to an error in the second processor system.
9. The method of claim 8 further comprising communicating to a first local disk in communication with the first processor system and a second local disk in communication with the second processor system.
10. The method of claim 9 wherein the first local disk and the second local disk are arranged in a RAID-1 configuration.
11. The method of claim 8 further comprising determining that the error is one of an actual error or a predicted error.
12. The method of claim 8 further comprising moving a system manager of the first processor system to the second processor system in response to the error.
13. The method of claim 8 further comprising restarting the one of the first or the second processor systems in response to the error, the restart clearing the error.
14. The system of claim 8 wherein the fault is one of a loss-of-link fault, a quality of service fault and a business connectivity fault.