What happens if the vCentre server fails

[Kimbie]

We are going to have two ESXi hosts in a HP c7000 blade centre with a distributed vswitch

The vCenter software will be installed a separate physical machine with the database stroed on our SQL2005 server again a separate physical host.

A few questions were regarding this setup.

1. What happens if the vCentre server looses connection to the database server?

2. What happens if the vCentre server looses connection to the HP blade centre?

3. What happens if the vCentre looses connection to both the database server and the HP blade server?

The biggest concern we have is if any of the above happen our system will fall over and not be able to accessed from the main network, and since this will be hosting our email platform I am keen to get this right.

Thanks

Kimbie

[FredPeterson]

VirtualCenter Server is absolutely required for only a few things, none of which would cause the virtual infrastructure itself to encounter issues. VMware HA is independent of VirtualCenter as each ESX host communicates with the other hosts for HA.

**However if you are using Fault Tolerance with vCenter vSphere 4 then that would fail I believe. Someone with more experience will have to explain what the failure actually is as I do not have experience with it yet however I do believe all that fails is the FT mechanism itself, rendering the FT clone a dud.

Should your vCenter server fail and you need to access a host and its VM's, you can simply connect directly to the host with the vCenter client.

"But which host has which VM's?" Its a good idea to regularly get an output of where VM's are at, but I suppose with just two servers its not too much of an inconvenience if you choose the wrong host the first time

[weinstein5]

1. What happens if the vCentre server looses connection to the database server?

vCenter will crash - your ESX hosts and their respective virtual machines will still continue to run, DRS and vMotion will stop working but HA will confinue to work

2. What happens if the vCentre server looses connection to the HP blade centre?

Same as #1

3. What happens if the vCentre looses connection to both the database server and the HP blade server?

Same as #1

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[sketchy00]

The other answers provided are correct. You could go with a slightly different approach and have many more options in front of you in case of failure. Build up an older box (an old workstation is fine) with ESXi on it, connect it to the SAN, and have this ESXi host just have one VM running on it, which is running vcenter. That way, it's virtualized, and living/protected on the SAN, but the VM running vcenter is not part of any cluster. This is the way I have it deployed, and it works very well.

[Kimbie]

So if the vCentre fails to the outside word eg the users they wont notice any difference?

Kimbie

[weinstein5]

The users of vCenter will notice but the users of the VM should not be impacted at all -

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[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

The configuration you describe will not let you take advantage of VMware HA because VMware HA will still function even if vCenter is not up - so if the VM hosting a vCenter is running in an HA cluster the VM will restart if the hosts it is running on fails -

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[Kimbie]

Thanks for the info