A virtual machine fault tolerance method, including receiving a network request, and separately sending the network request to a primary virtual machine and a secondary virtual machine, receiving a network response data packet, where the network response data packet is a primary-end data packet transmitted by the primary virtual machine or a secondary-end data packet transmitted by the secondary virtual machine, comparing data of the received network response data packet with the peer-end data according to data byte order when peer-end data is stored, and generating and sending a newly created data packet to the client when the compared data is the same, where the newly created data packet includes the compared data. Hence, network performance and computing performance of the primary virtual machine can be improved without modifying network protocol stacks of the primary virtual machine and the secondary virtual machine.