Tim,
Thanks. Yeah, even with the software solutions you will lose the VIP for the amount of time it takes to drop the vip, drop the application, export the storage, and reverse the process on the other node. Depending on the application it would take about five minutes, which I am fine with. It's not 100% uptime, but it provides an automated means of ensuring that if something does go wrong, then the system will come back online as quickly as possible.
As far as VMWare HA and VMWare app HA, I'm not sure of the difference, I will have to look into that... I was thinking of the "normal" I guess.
I also looked into the DSR, which sounds very interesting, but our application is a reverse proxy that is terminating SSL traffic in order to examine session ids for stateful traffic, e.g. cookies, so I did not think re-distributing load would work for us because of the nature of the traffic. However, it the reverse proxy went down for five minutes, I could live with that. I think... :smileywink:
Thanks,
DL.