there is a 60 day evaluation of vCenter Server Heartbeat available on the public VMware website, you can select the try now option on the heartbeat page. This is a full functional evaluation, no limitatations applied and follows the normal evaluation policies of all VMware product evaluations.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server-heartbeat/

Justin King
Product Specialist - VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server-heartbeat/

if you are only providing protection of the database, you are only really backing up your application data. Depending on the downtime policy it could take hours, maybe days before your vCenter server is fully functional again and this can affect your business availability.

Yes VMs and ESX will continue to work but all invested technologies like vMotion, Storage vMotion, DRS, vCenter Plugins, VIEW provisioning etc will all be unavailable and overtime will affect the performance/SLAs etc of your mission critical applications. HA will reboot VMs but DRS will not be available to make recommendations or load balance the workload. Third party applications like SRM, Lab Manager etc will also not function if vCenter Server is unavailable.

The vCenter Server Heartbeat was driven by theVMware vCenter Server customer base and provides a level of fault tolerance for your vCenter Server infrastructure, whether physical or virtually deployed and will take reactive actions to hardware, software, network and application functionality issues.

Justin King
Product Specialist - VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server-heartbeat/

Thank you for the clarification on this Justin, I simply missed the obvious. I agree, if the product was driven by VMware's Customer base than the importance and the necessity is worth the effort to develop such a product. As a VMware customer, we have put in many feature requests surrounding the product suite VMware offers.

For us, VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat just doesn't make sense. If your database is intact and well protected and with the ability to run vCenter as a VM, you can have an instance back up and production ready in less than an hour. Yes, it will affect some products and features you mentioned but for a very short period of time, but will it affect production? I guess that is a question each company has to answer. For us, supporting a clinical environment, we feel the outage of vCenter for a short period of time would not affect patient care or any other production systems.

Our company is a full VMware shop and I believe in VMware and their products. What works for one company may not work for another.