XenServer HA ensures continuous operation during server or VM downtime. It offers benefits such as business continuity, failure recovery, automation, and load balancing. Configuring HA requires following specific steps.
Updated by Dan Zeng on 2023/09/28
XenServer High Availability (e.g. XenServer HA) is a feature of the Citrix XenServer virtualization platform designed to provide continuous availability to maintain virtualized environments in the event of physical server or VM downtime. XenServer HA uses failover technology to ensure that VM workloads can be quickly migrated to other healthy hosts in the event of host failure, thereby reducing the risk of business interruption.
Xen high availability is a powerful tool that offers many benefits. From ensuring uninterrupted operation and seamless failure recovery, to automating resource management and optimizing performance, this virtualization solution has become an indispensable tool for the modern enterprise. Let's take a closer look at the benefits of XenServer HA.
Business Continuity: XenServer HA automatically migrates VMs from failed hosts to healthy hosts to ensure business continuity.
Failure Recovery: In the event of a failure, Xen high availability is able to automatically perform failure recovery without manual intervention and ensures that the VM can be restarted on an available host.
Automation: XenServer high availability is an automation feature that manages the migration and recovery of VMs based on pre-defined policies and rules. Make virtualized environments more automated.
Load Balancing: XenServer HA can migrate VMs to available nodes to spread the workload to ensure optimal resource utilization. Avoiding resource overload on certain nodes improves performance and scalability.
Let's now explore the process of configuring high availability in XenServer. To ensure you're well-prepared for setting up Xen high availability, here are the prerequisites:
（1） The VMs must be placed in shared storage, such as iSCSI, FC SAN;
（2） Two or more XenServer hosts are required and resource pooling is set up;
（3） All XenServer hosts have static IP addresses;
（4） XenServer version needs to support HA (i.e. Enterprise and above)
To configure XenServer high availability, following these steps:
1. In Xencenter, right-click the Pool > select High Availability
2. The configuration wizard will scan the pool for a heartbeat storage repository (SR). If an appropriate SR is not found, the wizard will exit, and a high availability heartbeat storage repository must be created.
3. When found the appropriate SR, select it > click Next
4. Select one or more VMs to specify:
The HA restart priority that defines if VMs should be – with enough resources available in the pool – Restarted, Restarted if Possible, and Do Not Restart
The Restart Order - 0 being the highest - that specifies the priority of a VM (or VMs) to be started under a fail-over condition
The Attempt to start next VM delay that specifies how much time should pass before starting the next priority-based VM (or group of VMs). This is to ensure pool resources are not overwhelmed when recovering from a failover condition
5. Click Next > hit Finish
Although XenServer HA can automatically migrate VMs to other working hosts to ensure high availability, it does not provide direct backup functionality itself. If you need to back up VMs, consider using third-party backup software.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a backup solution designed for virtual machine environments. It provides comprehensive and powerful VM backup and recovery features designed to protect and manage critical data in the virtualization environment.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a backup solution designed for virtual machines of VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, oVirt, RHV, etc. It provides comprehensive and powerful VM backup and recovery features like agentless backup, instant recovery, V2V migration designed to protect and manage critical data in the virtualization environment.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery's operation is very simple, just a few simple steps. Just select VMs on the host > then select backup destination > select strategies > finally submit the job
Vinchin offers a free 60-day trial for users to experience the functionality in a real-world environment. For more information, please contact Vinchin directly or contact our local partners.
In summary, XenServer HA ensures uninterrupted virtualization operations and seamless failover with automation and load balancing features. To configure it, meet the prerequisites and follow the step-by-step guide above. For comprehensive VM protection, consider using a third-party backup solution, such as Vinchin Backup & Recovery, designed specifically for virtualized environments, which is easy to set up and offers a free 60-day trial.
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