Heartbeat vs HA

[Josh26]

Hi,

This really feels like a dumb question, but I've been struggling with it.

A vCenter server, is placed on a cluster of several hosts, configured with HA.

It's given fact that HA works in this scenario, and it's one I've tested on multiple deployments - HA brings the server up elsewhere, and then it runs. All that's down in the meantime, is things like DRS.

So, what use is Heartbeat?

I've tried to research it but it's hard to get through the sales pitch. I keep getting the surveys from VMware with questions like "can you afford for your entire infrastructure to magically go offline because you didn't buy Heartbeat" but they don't reflect reality.

In a complete DR scenario, the push is for SRM, which as far as I can see takes over that role.

I'm planning in investing some lab time on Heartbeat - I noted it's now in the VCP5 blueprint, but I kind of feel like I need to know what I'm trying to achieve before I build it.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Heartbeat provides for 'instantaneous' failover with no down time while HA there will be a brief outage - that is the major difference - 

[rickardnobel]

David Weinstein wrote:

Heartbeat provides for 'instantaneous' failover with no down time while HA there will be a brief outage - that is the major difference - 

Quite high price, $ 9995, for the instantaneous failover still.

[rickardnobel]

Josh26 wrote:

I noted it's now in the VCP5 blueprint,

I did just check the VCP5 blueprint, but did not find any reference to the vCenter Heartbeat?

[Josh26]

Rickard wrote:

I did just check the VCP5 blueprint, but did not find any reference to the vCenter Heartbeat?

Hi,

It appears I was incorrect.

Point still stands, it's incredibly expensive for the failover to go from "a few minutes" to "instant", in a situation where, if a host failed, business is probably more impacted by the other servers on that host than vCenter.

[rickardnobel]

Josh26 wrote:

It appears I was incorrect.

It is good if VMware does not include such add-on products into the main VCP test and keep it at the core technologies.

[Josh26]

Rickard wrote:

Josh26 wrote:

It appears I was incorrect.

It is good if VMware does not include such add-on products into the main VCP test and keep it at the core technologies.

They DO include "Guided Consolidation". This was the subject of a post I made on the certification forum a while back.

It's an add-on that noone uses,  and suddenly you needed to be all over it to get a cert.

[rickardnobel]

Josh26 wrote:

They DO include "Guided Consolidation". This was the subject of a post I made on the certification forum a while back.

It's an add-on that noone uses,  and suddenly you needed to be all over it to get a cert.

It is at least a free add-on, even if few people used it.

For 5.0 the product is removed all together so it will not be in the test!