A common misconception I see out there is that High Availability and Disaster Recovery are not the same yet I still see them sometimes designed as if they are and confusing the two is one of the most common architectural mistakes I still see in modern VMware environments.
Most organizations believe they are 100% protected because their systems are highly available, but what they actually have is high confidence during expected failures and very few options during unexpected ones.
The core misconception at a fundamental level:
- HA assumes the platform is trustworthy.
- DR assumes the platform is compromised or gone.
When organizations rely on:
- Single storage arrays (fully redundant with multi-controllers)
- Single vCenter instances (fully protected with multiple data protection methods)
- HA without independent recovery (recovery mechanisms relying on vCenter being online to perform required actions)
Everything looks great until a failure crosses a boundary HA was never designed to handle to begin with.
HA does helps when a host fails, but it does not help when:
- A storage controller goes randomly offline (panic mode)
- An upgrade corrupts state
- Ransomware starts encrypting data
- The management plane becomes unavailable
- Human error cascades faster than automation can react
Organizations that recover fastest are not the ones with the most features enabled, but the ones with options, and options come from systems independence.
Architectural rule: If recovery depends on the system that failed, it isn’t real recovery.
Do you agree or disagree?
