8. vCloud Operations Control : 8.7 Availability Management
   
8.7 Availability Management
Availability Management focuses on cost-effectively meeting or exceeding the agreed service level requirements for the level of availability provided for all vCloud service offerings. Managing availability in a vCloud environment depends on VMware vCloud Director component availability and on the resilience of the underlying infrastructure. vCloud Director works transparently with VMware vCenter Server to provision and deploy virtual machines on hosts. It is imperative to architect redundancy and protect the infrastructure components. Provisioned virtual machines can be protected by VMware vSphere High Availability (HA). Virtual machines can also be protected by backup tools in the guest operating system or vStorage API.