Citrix Essentials High availability in Essentials for XenServer enables simple, automated failover of virtual workloads ensuring that affected applications or business services are automatically restarted on available resources with minimum interruption.

With high availability, IT administrators can:

• Minimize application downtime and business service disruption


• Automate service recovery for all business critical applications


• Remove the need for dedicated backup hardware

Every physical and virtual server within a resource pool maintains a heartbeat to ensure machines are available and responsive. Loss of a heartbeat initiates the process of automated failover, where protected virtual machines that are affected are restarted on other, healthy servers without requiring administrative intervention and ensuring that essential business services are restored without disruption

In the event that a resource pool no longer has the spare capacity to restart high priority workloads, the IT administrator can be alerted or new resources automatically brought online through integration with Workflow orchestration.

High availability and disaster recovery

Citrix Essentials includes support for the latest disaster recovery technologies, including data replication from leading storage vendors.  Seamless storage integration enables administrators to easily configure critical workloads for disaster recovery with simple controls for adding each protected virtual machine to a pool of replicated storage devices.  Once replicated, virtual environments can be easily restored at remote facilities.

With Citrix Essentials IT administrators can quickly restore an entire virtual environment at designated disaster recovery locations.  Configuration data is automatically exported for an entire resource pool and replicated along with the protected workloads.  During a recovery operation, virtual infrastructure can be remotely restarted with resource pool and configuration settings applied to ensure maximum business continuity.