Your VM Perplexities Called, and They Need You to Read This.
Virtualization can give you enormous flexibility with future workloads and can be a key enabler for other areas, like cloud computing and disaster recovery. So, how can you get a handle on the performance challenges in your virtual environment and manage deployments without erasing the potential upside? Learn the four key areas you need to be focusing on to help deliver a healthy and well-performing data center.
Get your free white paper.
Updated: September 13, 2017
This topic applies to all Orion Platform products except for SolarWinds ETS.
Use a virtual IP address (VIP) to reference your protected servers when you are protecting a server on a single subnet. Use a virtual hostname either on a single subnet or across multiple subnets.
| Single Subnet | Multiple Subnets | |
|---|---|---|
| VIP | Yes | No |
| virtual hostname | Yes | Yes |
A Virtual IP (VIP) address is an IP address that is shared by both members of a HA server pool on the same subnet. When a member of the pool goes down, the other pool member takes over the VIP address and responds to requests sent to the VIP. The VIP and each pool member must be part of the same subnet.
The VIP option is only available for HA pools on a single subnet and HA pool members must use static IPv4 IP addresses.
The VIP option is not available when running HA in the cloud. Instead, you must use a virtual hostname.
SolarWinds High Availability does not support IPv6 addresses.
You have two options when choosing a VIP address.
If you lock down the IP addresses you send information to and receive information from, you must make configuration changes to your devices because the HA pool may send polling requests from one of three IP addresses.
You can use SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager to update your router and switch configurations.
A virtual hostname is shared by both members of the HA pool. Only the active member of the HA pool responds to the virtual hostname. Use a virtual hostname to connect to your Orion server or additional polling engine HA pools when they span two different subnets or are deployed on the cloud.
You can use a virtual hostname when configuring an HA pool on a single subnet or over two subnets.
You can create a new virtual hostname on the fly when you create an HA pool or create a virtual hostname before creating your HA pool.
SolarWinds strongly discourages you from using your original Orion server's host name as the virtual hostname. You must modify your reverse lookup zones manually in this scenario.