About Just In Time Availability


About Just In Time Availability
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The Just In Time Availability solution provides increased availability to the applications on a single node InfoScale Availability cluster in VMware virtual environments.

Using the Just In Time Availability solution, you can create plans for:

Planned Maintenance
Unplanned Recovery

Planned Maintenance

In the event of planned maintenance, the Just In Time Availability solution enables you to clone a virtual machine, bring it online, and fail over the applications running on that virtual machine to the clone on the same ESX host. After the maintenance procedure is complete, you can fail back the applications to the original virtual machine. Besides failover and failback operations, you can delete a virtual machine clone, view the properties of the virtual machine and its clone, and so on.

Unplanned Recovery

When an application encounters an unexpected or unplanned failure on the original or primary virtual machine on the primary ESX host, the Just In Time Availability solution enables you to recover the application and bring it online using the unplanned recovery feature.

With Unplanned Recovery Policies, the Just In Time Availability solution enables you to set up recovery policies to mitigate unplanned failures that are encountered by an application. Just In Time Availability solution provides the following recovery policies; you may select one or all the recovery policies as per your need:

Unplanned Recovery Policies

Description

Restart Application

Just In Time Availability (JIT) solution attempts to restart the service group (SG), and bring the application online on the original virtual machine on primary ESX.

Maximum three retry attempts are permitted under this policy.

Note:

If all the three attempts fail, application continues to remain in faulted state or continues with the next policy as selected while creating a plan.

Restart virtual machine (VM)

Just In Time Availability (JIT) solution performs the following subsequent tasks:

take the service group offline
shut down the virtual machine
power on the virtual machine
bring the service group online on the original virtual machine on primary ESX

You are provided with Last attempt will be VM reset option to reset the virtual machine.

By default, this checkbox is selected and the default retry attempt value is one. If you retain the default settings, then VM reset operation is performed on the virtual machine at the first attempt itself.

Maximum three retry attempts are permitted for this operation.

If you deselect the checkbox, then the virtual machine reset (VM Reset) operation is not performed.

Restart VM on target ESX

Using this policy, you can recover the faulted application on the virtual machine.

In this policy, the original virtual machine is unregistered from the primary ESX; registered on the target ESX; and the faulted application is brought online on the target ESX.

Restore VM on target ESX

Using this policy, you can recover the faulted application on the virtual machine using a boot disk backup copy of the original virtual machine.

In this policy, the original virtual machine is unregistered from the ESX and the boot disk backup copy of the original virtual machine is registered on target ESX. The faulted application is then brought online on the virtual machine.

Unplanned Failback

The Unplanned Failback operation lets you fail back the application from the boot disk backup copy of virtual machine on the target ESX to the original virtual machine on primary ESX.

If you have selected either Restart VM on target ESX or Restore VM on target ESX or both the recovery policies, you can perform the Unplanned Failback operation.

On the Plans tab, in the plans table list, right-click the virtual machine and click Unplanned Failback.

Note:

Unplanned Failback operation operation is disabled and not available for the plans and the virtual machines which have Restart Application and Restart VM policies as the only selected options.

Based on the selected recovery policy for a plan, Just In Time Availability (JIT) solution performs the necessary operations in the sequential order.

For example, if you have selected Restart Application and Restart VM as the recovery policy, then in the event of unplanned application failure, first it performs tasks for Restart Application policy and if that fails, it moves to the next policy.

You may select one or all the recovery policies based on your requirement.

Table: Tasks performed for each Unplanned Recovery policy lists the sequence of tasks that are performed for each Unplanned Recovery policy.

Table: Tasks performed for each Unplanned Recovery policy

Unplanned Recovery Policy	Tasks Performed
Restart Application	Make an attempt to restart the application.
Restart virtual machine (VM)	Takes the service group(s) offline Shuts down the virtual machine Power on the virtual machine Brings the service group(s) online
Restart VM on target ESX	Takes the service group(s) offline Shuts down the original virtual machine Detaches the data disks from the original virtual machine Unregisters the virtual machine from the primary ESX Registers the original virtual machine on target ESX Attaches the data disks back to the virtual machine Power on the virtual machine Brings the service group(s) online
Restore VM on target ESX	Takes the service group(s) offline Shuts down the virtual machine Detaches the data disks from the virtual machine Unregisters the original virtual machine from the target ESX Registers the boot disk backup copy of the original virtual machine to the target ESX Attaches the data disks back to the virtual machine Power on the virtual machine Brings the service group(s) online
Unplanned Failback	Takes the service group(s) offline Shuts down the virtual machine Detaches the data disks from the virtual machine Unregisters the virtual machine from the target ESX Registers the virtual machine using the original boot disk backup copy to the primary ESX Attaches the data disks to the virtual machine Power on the virtual machine on primary ESX Brings the service group(s) online on the virtual machine

Scheduler Settings

While creating a plan for unplanned recovery, with Scheduler Settings, you can set up a schedule for taking a back up of boot disk of all the virtual machines that are a part of the plan.

To use the Just In Time Availability solution, go to vSphere Web Client > Home view > Veritas AppProtect.

See Setting up a plan.