Virtual Machine (VM) technologies, such as VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V are becoming increasingly popular. They provide great flexibility in deploying servers within an organization. VM implementaions can also provide high-availability through the use of VM clusters. When a VM is running in a highly available VM cluster, any failure of the physical hardware will not affect the running VM as it is seemlessly transferred to another node in the cluster.

Implementing high-availability using VM infrastructure is much simpler to install and manage than using the built-in operating system and application clustering support. You simply set up your VM instances and the VM infrastructure ensures they continue to run uninterrupted.

This allows you to setup PaperCut just like on a physical server, but allow the VM infrastructure to provide the high availability.

This section discusses a generic clustered Virtual Machine setup.

PaperCut offers great flexibility and allows you to easily structure your installation into physical multi-tiered clustered components.

Clustering at Virtual Machine level offers these advantages over other “traditional” clustering setups:

Virtual Machine hosts can automatically detect when a VM crashes or becomes unresponsive. You should consider whether you will augment this with application level monitoring. Although the VM might be running normally, the underlying application may have problems and application level monitoring may detect this. Ways of perform application level monitoring can be achieved through (but not limited to):