  High availability has always been one of the main problems for a data center.
Till now high availability was achieved by host per host redundancy, a highly
expensive method in terms of hardware and human costs. A new approach to the
problem can be offered by virtualization. Using virtualization, it is possible
to achieve a redundancy system for all the services running on a data center.
This new approach to high availability allows the running virtual machines to
be distributed over a small number of servers, by exploiting the features of
the virtualization layer: start, stop and move virtual machines between
physical hosts. The 3RC system is based on a finite state machine, providing
the possibility to restart each virtual machine over any physical host, or
reinstall it from scratch. A complete infrastructure has been developed to
install operating system and middleware in a few minutes. To virtualize the
main servers of a data center, a new procedure has been developed to migrate
physical to virtual hosts. The whole Grid data center SNS-PISA is running at
the moment in virtual environment under the high availability system.
