Configuring Active-Passive VCSA by migrating existing VCenter server ?

[AlbertWT]

Hi People,

Can someone here please share some comments and steps in how to convert the existing two Production Vcenter server below:

Data Center 1:

PRODVCSA01-VA.domain1.com

VM: VCSA v6.5b

[normal vSwitch]

Data Center 2:

PRODVCENTER01.domain1.com

Physical: Windows Server 2008 R2 – VCenter 6.0 Update 1

[dvSwitch enabled]

So that I can cluster it better like below two nodes Active/Passive VCSA ?

I do not have any load balancer in my company so I will use DNS Round Robin to automatically provide resiliency.

Do I just use the same VCenter serial number/license in order to achieve that ?

[RajeevVCP4]

Without NLB it can not be possible.

[AlbertWT]

RajeevVCP4 , So what happened if I just use the normal DNS entry (Round-Robin)?

I assume the migration is also possible from VCSA to VCSA Active/Passive and also Windows VCenter to the Passive VCSA too with no downtime.

[Mattallford]

Maybe it is just me, but I'm a bit lost.

Can you confirm what it is you are trying to achieve and what your current status is?

Cheers, Matt.

[AlbertWT]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for chiming in, What I'd like to achieve is to reduce the number of VCenter licenses and also provide some sort of High Availability between the two different Data Center locations.

The upgrade maybe bit complex since there is dvSwitches in the other data center and no downtime is allowed.

[Mattallford]

Ok, so how many vCenter licenses do you currently have, and what would you like to reduce this down to?

A very common deployment model is to have 1 vCenter server per main site / datacentre. The vCenter HA feature also was designed for that - high availability (usually within the same location), not disaster recovery.

As noted in your diagrams, vCenter HA is an active / passive model. This means that the passive node is sitting there waiting for an issue to occur with the primary node, and when it does the passive node takes over ownership of the machine name, IP address, PNID etc and brings the services up. Due to it being passive, it still takes a few minutes for the services to start, so you wouldn't want to do any sort of load balancing or round robin DNS to the passive node, as it will not be responding to queries during normal operation where the active node is available.

Are you using any other products that use vCenter Server such as Site Recovery Manager, NSX, etc.

What are you using to protect virtual machine workloads in the environment? Is there any disaster recovery capability at the moment to bring up virtual machines in site 2 in the event of an issue in site 1?

[AlbertWT]

Matt,

As at the moment, I have two licenses for the VCenter on each data center site. My management would like to reduce the operational cost overhead thus by consolidating to single Active/Passive, VCenter, I can just use one VCenter server Standard license.

No, there is no other VMware product that is using the VCenter, only the Backup software that is compatible with vSphere 6.5

This is not for DR scenario, it is just for license reduction on the two production Data Center. The two sites are totally different.

[Mattallford]

Sure thing.

Well, vCenter HA has been designed for HA within the same site, not really cross site or as a DR solution. You would need to consider where you are going to place the witness node.

You will also need to keep in mind that you will have to set this up as an "advanced" vCenter HA configuration to do a distributed deployment, meaning you need to manually go through the process of creating clones of VC and setting up vCenter, adding NICs, doing OS customisation and doing HA manually.

Also if you have an issue, or are doing an upgrade and have to destroy and re-enable HA, you need to go through this same configuration again.

I guess what I'm saying is that your management have said they want to reduce the operational cost overhead, but deploying vCenter in a HA topology across sites could cause you more overhead than you are thinking it might.

I know you need to pay a second license, but a much more common model would be to have 2 vCenter Servers in each site, and 2 Platform Services Controllers in each site, all in the same vSphere SSO domain and using Enhanced Linked mode.

So, while vCenter HA cross sites is technically do-able, you have additional considerations you need to think about and it could make upgrade much more painful than they need to be.

Cheers, Matt.

[AlbertWT]

mattalford,

Yeah, that's what I thought so.

Can the witness be placed into maybe Azure VM in the cloud ?

1. Destroying VCenter HA
2. Manually configuring HA
3. Reconfiguring the dvSwitch using Migrating virtual machines between vSwitch or PortGroups to vDS or dvPortgroups (1010612) | VMware K... 

That sounds a lot of works and could possibly cause downtime or outage to the existing production VMs ?

[AlbertWT]

OK, so in this case, I can go with the later suggestion of configuring Enhanced Linked Mode VCSA ?

• 2x VCSA-VM
• 2x PSC-VM

Configured on each Data Centre, and then manually migrate the existing VCenter VCSA and Windows VCenter server to the new linked mode VCSA as above with no downtime ?

[Mattallford · Accepted solution]

Hi Albert,

Yes, that is a pretty standard topology for vSphere SSO and vCenter across two sites. Whether or not you want to look at adding additional PSC nodes and load balancing them, and then creating HA for vCenter in each site is another matter, but it sounds like you want to keep things simple.

You can certainly migrate hosts and VMs to a greenfield deployment without any downtime. Depending on what else you have configured in your environment (roles, permissions, folder structure, cluster settings, etc) you may need to look for some scripts to migrate some of these configurations across, or of course you could go ahead and do it manually if your environment is not too big.

There are a few resources I would recommend checking out:

VMworld 2017 SER2958BU Migrate to the VMware vCenter Server Appliance You Should - YouTube

SER2940BU - Become a Superhero Architect of Your vSphere SSO Domain - YouTube

vCenter Server High Availability - YouTube

vCenter Server Topology Considerations - YouTube

[AlbertWT]

Many thanks Matt for the assistance in this matter.

[AlbertWT]

RajeevVCP4 , thank you for the suggestion. So does the NLB is still a requirement if I deploy the 2x VCSA as Active Passive in the same Data Center ?

[Mattallford]

Hi Albert,

You do not need a NLB or round robin DNS for the vCenter Server component when deploying vCenter HA (Active/Passive). As only one of the nodes are active, you do not want to direct traffic to the passive node at any time. If the active node fails, the passive node will come online and will take ownership of the name and IP address.

If you wanted to make the PSC nodes highly available within a site, you would need to use a load balancer. You then use the virtual IP address when pointing vCenter Server to the PSC nodes, and not the IP of a PSC node itself.

Cheers, Matt.

[AlbertWT]

I see Matt,

So, in this case, the PSC will be on its standalone VMs (on two different ESXi servers).

What about the witness server, can I use the witness server in another Data Center location like Azure or it is recommended to be in same Datacenter different ESXi hosts as well ?