vCenter & HA

[curiousagain]

Hi,

I have a fundamental question regarding vCenter & HA.

I want to build a HA environment with vCenter & 2 ESXi hosts.

If I put the vCenter as a VM on ESXi host and that host is going down, how the vCenter can start all the vm's on the other host (HA) - as it also will be down?

Thanks.

[jbogardus · Accepted solution]

vCenter is involved in configuring HA, but the server is not actually invovled in executing HA. Once configuration change to HA are made, the HA configuration is stored both on the ESX servers for operation, and the VC database for configuration management, and the HA Cluster will operate independently of the vCenter server. The ESX servers in the cluster send heartbeats between themselves to determine failures, and the vCenter server is not involved in checking for those heartbeats.

[krowczynski]

Hi,

if one ESXi wnt down HA will start the machine on the second host!

[bulletprooffool]

The VC is only used in the configuration of HA - when you deploy HA, the agents are actually distributed to each of your ESX hosts, and the services started.

The config is also distributed to each of the hosts and these then run heartbeats to verify connectivity / isolation. If you lost your VC, these hosts continue to operate AND are still able to HA etc =- so should the ESX hostingVC die / become isolated , it will be restarted on a different ESX host.