Availability and redundancy

Google Cloud VMware Engine provides availability for your applications running on VMware in your private cloud environment. The following table lists failure scenarios and the associated availability features that help protect your applications.

Failure scenario	Application protected?	VMware Engine HA feature	VMware HA feature	Google Cloud feature
Disk failure	Yes	Fast replacement of failed node	About the vSAN Default Storage Policy
Fan failure	Yes	Redundant fans, fast replacement of failed node
NIC failure	Yes	Redundant NIC, fast replacement of failed node
Host power failure	Yes	Redundant power supply
ESXi host failure	Yes	Fast replacement of failed node	VMware vSphere High Availability
VM failure	Yes		VMware vSphere High Availability	Load balancer for stateless VMware VMs
Leaf switch port failure	Yes	Redundant NIC
Leaf switch failure	Yes	Redundant leaf switches
Rack failure	Yes	Placement groups
Network connectivity to on-premises	Yes	Redundant networking services		Redundant Dedicated Interconnect and Partner Interconnect circuits
Network connectivity	Yes			Redundant Dedicated Interconnect and Partner Interconnect circuits
Regional failure	Yes			Hosting regions

Availability features

Fast replacement of a failed node

VMware Engine continuously monitors the health of VMware clusters. When VMware Engine detects an ESXi node failure, it adds a new ESXi host to the affected VMware cluster from its pool of readily available nodes and removes the failed node from the cluster. This functionality quickly restores the spare capacity in the VMware cluster, supporting the cluster's resiliency provided by vSAN and VMware vSphere High Availability (HA).

Placement groups

A user who creates a private cloud can select a region and a placement group within the selected region. A placement group is a set of nodes spread across multiple racks but within the same spine network segment. Nodes within the same placement group can reach each other with a maximum of two extra switch hops. A placement group is always within a single availability zone and spans multiple racks. The control plane distributes nodes of a private cloud across multiple racks based on best effort. Nodes in different placement groups are guaranteed to be placed in different racks.

Availability zones

VMware Engine private clouds are hosted in a user-selected Google Cloud location. These locations are composed of regions and zones. A region is a specific geographical location where you can host your resources. Each region has one or more zones.

Resources in different regions are isolated from most types of physical infrastructure and infrastructure software service failures. You can design a robust system and distribute resources across different failure domains to protect your applications and data from data center failures.

Redundant networking services

All Google networking services for the private cloud (including firewall, public IP addresses, internet, Dedicated Interconnect, Partner Interconnect, and Cloud VPN) are highly available and support the SLA.