High Availability. Avoid Overloaded Resources | Parallels Insights
Last updated on January 14, 2021
High availability refers to a process that is continuously operational and does not fail for a long time. In IT, computer systems and environments consist of many core components, each required for the system to operate as a whole. If one of these components fails, the system will cease to operate, causing downtime until restored.
Businesses must understand the cost associated with this downtime. In package shipping services, for example, tens of thousands of dollars are lost for each hour of downtime. In extreme cases such as brokerage operations, one hour of downtime could result in a loss of millions of dollars.
To add further perspective to the repercussions of downtime, consider Amazon’s multibillion-dollar retail website. In 2012, the amazon.com homepage went down: attempts to access the amazon.com portal were met with the error Http/1.1 Service Unavailable. The outage lasted for 49 minutes. Considering that amazon.com’s revenue report for that period declared earnings of about $10.8 billion per quarter, or $118 million per day and about $4.9 million per hour, the losses incurred as a result of this downtime were substantial.
Challenges Faced
Methods of ensuring high availability differ depending on the technical considerations for the system in question. However, regardless of the environment, the general goal of high availability is to add a layer of redundancy to the system, whereby if one component fails, another identical component seamlessly takes its place without interruption of service.
In virtualization delivery solutions, servers process RDS and VDI host connections to provide desktops or applications to users. If the server or one of its components is affected and the system experiences downtime, users will no longer be able to access their desktops and resources. Organizations typically opt for expensive and complex hardware-based network load balancing solutions to distribute network load across multiple servers.
Load Balancing High Availability with Parallels RAS
Parallels RAS is equipped with a technology that distributes RDS and VDI connections between the gateways. This added layer of redundancy ensures that the end-user never experiences any hiccups while using the system. With Parallels RAS, high availability load balancing is available out of the box at no additional cost.
But we didn’t stop there. Parallels RAS ensures complete terminal server redundancy by checking server availability before forwarding a connection to a particular server. RDS or VDI host connections are distributed to the least loaded server, which is best suited to handle the connection. Load balancing is automatically enabled on all servers by default, and no complex configuration is required.
Thankfully, Parallels RAS provides a “high availability load balancing” solution that ensures continuity of service, no matter the outage. So what are you waiting for?
Download your 30-day full-featured Parallels RAS trial today!
References:
Load-Balancing High Availability – (HA) | techtarget.com
Load Balancing | CTI
High availability with Load Balancer | IBM Knowledge Center
What Is High Availability? – nginx
