Compatibility of high availability clusters supporting application failover with shared storage in a virtualization environment without sacrificing on virtualization features

摘要

Compatibility is provided between a high availability clustering system and a virtualization environment. A hardware level hypervisor runs on each host, and VM(s) run on each hypervisor. A shared virtual storage manager runs on each VM, and facilitates sharing virtual storage between VMs. Sharing virtual storage can be performed in the context of a failed application or VM. A shared virtual storage manager VM detects that the application is being failed over from the source VM to the target VM, detaches the virtual storage from the source VM, and attaches it to the target VM. The shared virtual storage manager can also enable sharing of the virtual storage when a monitored application is failed over in response to the failure of a hypervisor. Virtual storage can additionally act as an arbitrator to resolve an occurrence of split brain, when VMs become disconnected.