VMware Horizon Community
gunnarb
Expert
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How one service failed my entire View environment.

This isn't a question, more of a statement. I found out this morning how important the vCenter service is to a View environment. It failed last night due to some SQL issue during the backup, so SQL is at fault and not vCenter, however regardless vCenter failed. This morning my entire View environment was unable to log in. I was able to figure out the cause and solve it in a few minutes, but this was after I suffered a mild heart attack. I thought for sure I must have overlooked something in the architecture planning guide so I printed it out. Come to find out even in environments of 2000 View desktops VMWare only recommends one vCenter server. Are they nuts? Having one server just had my entire View deployment fail (only about 60 VMs so far but we are growing). I don't know about you but I don't like 60 upset people in the morning.

I asked some professionals about this and they recommend I get vCenter Heartbeat. After reading about this product I found that they are correct, this would solve me issues. So the question I have now is, why isn't this in the Architecture Planning Guide? Also, this product is VERY expensive, heck it nearly doubles the cost of my View environment! Sounds to me like it should be bundled into your View Preimier licenses.

In any case, i wanted the public to be aware of how one service can completely kill your environment and how VMWare fails to mention this in the planning guide. Comments are welcome.

Gunnar Berger http://www.gunnarberger.com http://www.endusercomputing.com
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mikebarnett
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Can you let us know what the problem was that caused your desktops to be unavailable?

View should still be able to broker connections to the VMs even if VC is down. Were the VMs set to be powered off?

I'm just curious because if it's serious then maybe we should get a KB written!

-Mike

Twitter: @MikeBarnett_
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gunnarb
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A SysAdmin here was working on a SQL Backup Script. This script caused a failure on our SQL server which recovered immediately. This caused a failure on our vCenter Server, which did not recover even though the service was set to restart. The VMs power off every night and power back on at 6AM. They didn't power on due to vCenter being down.

I think this is a pretty major issue IMO. vCenter Heartbeat is a solution for it but as I stated, it is very expensive. We shutdown our VMs for recomposing reasons and for DPM every night.

-Gunnar

Gunnar Berger http://www.gunnarberger.com http://www.endusercomputing.com
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mikebarnett
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Ah, I see. Yes, that will cause a problem for you.

Thank you for the follow up!

-Mike

Twitter: @MikeBarnett_
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