OpenSAF and VMware from the perspective of high availability

Cloud services are becoming one of the most popular means of delivering computational services to users who demand services with higher availability. Virtualization is one of the key enablers of the cloud infrastructure. Availability of the virtual machines along with the availability of the hosted software components are the fundamental ingredients for achieving highly available services in the cloud. There are some availability solutions introduced by virtualization vendors like VMware HA and VMware FT. At the same time the SAForum specifications and OpenSAF as a compliant implementation offer a standard based open solution for service high availability. In this paper, we investigate these solutions for availability through experiments, compare them according to metrics and based on the results propose architectures that combine them to provide highly available applications in virtualized environments.