Deployment of vCenter HA on three independent ESXi hosts (w/o vSphere Cluster) possible?

[leonardwinck]

Hey there,

I'm planning on deploying a vCenter HA setup and did some testing. I noticed that I wasn't able to deploy the vCenter HA's passive/witness nodes to ESXi hosts which do not belong to the same vSphere cluster as the active node's host.

None of the ESXi hosts have shared storage or are using vSAN, since all applications on them are creating their own application level clusters, combining the three ESXi hosts into a vSphere cluster really doesn't seem to make sense for me.

Still, if I don't combine the ESXi hosts, which are supposed to host the three vCenter HA nodes, into the same vSphere cluster, I'm unable to deploy the vCenter HA nodes to any of them rather receive the following error messages:

"A specified parameter was not correct: spec.pool."
"Resource pool and host do not belong to the same compute resource."

Is it really a requirement to have the ESXi hosts which'll hold the vCenter HA's nodes in a vSphere cluster, or is there a way to utilize vCenter HA with three independent ESXi hosts?

[pdirmann01]

In my experience, you'll need to deploy them to the same host/cluster first, then you can vMotion the witness and passive nodes to whichever host/cluster you want, given that they all can pass traffic on the required VLANs.

[leonardwinck]

This seems to probably be a valid solution.

I found an interesting, second way:

1. In the vCenter HA wizard, fill out all screen masks, including the one of the step (NIC configuration).
2. Go back one step.
3. Click "Continue" two times REALLY FAST. The system won't have time to check for any conflicts or misconfigurations and just send you to the summary page.

Now you can just click "finish" and it'll deploy your cluster as if there hadn't been any errors beforehand.

I'm currently doing some failover testing and stuff, but it really seem to have not affected the reliability of the cluster at all to have deployed it in such a.. janky manner.

[pdirmann01]

Inter...esting. Good find!...I think. 🙂

[JohnEllis201110]

LOL, I can't believe that worked!  😄    Thanks

[green_bread]

Excellent find and thank you for sharing. I literally LOL'd as I qucik-clicked past the errors that had been frustrating me!!

[volcano3]

Was it fixed in v7? We have VCSA 7.0.3 and when I tried to pull this trick I've got an error: "Deploy a vCenter HA cluster - A specified parameter was not correct: spec.pool" is Task Console.

[SDL_]

Hi, just had the same issue too .... and the trick still works ....

[jspranger]

Well, I deployed it on the same cluster, and just storage vmotioned it to the cluster I wanted it on.