Migration of Virtual IP Addresses in a Failover Cluster

A method, comprising:

• establishing, among two or more devices, a policy that defines which of the devices is responsible for hosting an application;
• running the application on a host device identified by the policy;
• receiving a health probe message from a load balancer;
• sending a response to the health probe message from the host device, the response notifying the load balancer that the host device is responsible for hosting the application.

A system comprising:

• a load balancer exposing a Virtual IP (VIP) address to a network;
• a plurality of virtual machines hosted on a plurality of servers, each of the virtual machines assigned an address and adapted to receive and respond to health probes from the load balancer;
• and
• a mapping maintained by the load balancer, the mapping indicating a relationship between the VIP and one or more of the addresses;
• wherein the load balancer routes packets directed to the VIP address to a virtual machine's address based upon the virtual machines' responses to the health probes.