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.