We've all worked with our traditional Windows clusters and enjoyed the great availability it can deliver to us, but we've been only limited with the so-called "cluster aware" applications in order to enjoy this great uptime. Then when we all experienced the great virtualization technologies, and saw what VMware HA can deliver, no matter what OS/Application we want to protect, we thought that was it, the magic solution for protecting our application and grant high availability for them. But again it was annoying to have this abnormal shutdown and reboot of the VMs.

New technologies are coming now from both the physical and virtual worlds to address this issue, it's the Fault-Tolerance! Marathon everRun FT has a great product (that I may be publishing demo videos about soon) that work on both the physical and virtual environments to achieve this "zero-downtime" and true fault tolerance for any application.

Recently Marathon announced their partnership with Microsoft to deliver this technology to Hyper-V, and by that Microsoft will be running head-to-head in the competition with VMware's FT which will be released in their next vSphere platform coming sometime this year.

Here are some videos to show you how great technologies will soon become the standards for our highly available applications:

VMware FT: http://www.vmware.com/products/fault-tolerance/
Marathon everRun FT: http://www.marathontechnologies.com/product_demo.html
Citrix XenServer + everRun VM: http://www.marathontechnologies.com/media/everrun_vm/everrun_vm_demo.html