Question

Difficulty: MediumResilience, High Availability, and Redundancy

A security administrator is reviewing hardware resilience controls for an enterprise web application server host. The server host currently features dual redundant power supplies, hot-swappable cooling fans, and a RAID 10 storage array to prevent single points of hardware failure. However, a recent risk assessment highlighted that if the single physical host chassis or motherboard experiences a hardware fault, the application will become unavailable. Which of the following high-availability solutions should the administrator implement to automatically fail over virtualized workloads to a healthy physical host upon host hardware failure?

  1. Virtual machine hypervisor clustering with automated failoverAnswer
  2. B
    Daily automated disk image backups replicated to an offsite cloud repository
  3. C
    Multipath I/O configured across dual Host Bus Adapters
  4. D
    A cold disaster recovery site with pre-staged server hardware

Answer

Virtual machine hypervisor clustering with automated failover is the optimal solution for recovering workloads immediately after a physical compute host failure.
Virtual machine hypervisor clustering aggregates physical hosts into a cluster. When a physical host suffers a hardware fault, the cluster software automatically redistributes and restarts the running virtual instances on operational cluster nodes, ensuring service continuity.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the operational vulnerability described in the scenario.
The host already has internal hardware fault tolerance (RAID 10, dual PSUs, hot-swap fans), but remains vulnerable to total physical host hardware failure (chassis/motherboard).
Resolving single points of failure at the host level requires a compute-level high-availability control across host nodes.
2
Evaluate candidate high-availability controls against the requirement for automated failover.
Hypervisor clustering maintains state awareness across physical hosts and automatically migrates or restarts virtual machines on healthy hosts when a node fails.
This maintains service availability with minimal interruption without requiring manual intervention or rebuilding servers.

Key Concept

Hypervisor Clustering and Compute Failover
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