Failover vCenter Appliance VM's in Same Site?

[Carlos201110141]

Currently we have vCenter running as follows:

Site = LA

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGI2K10

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGISK12

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGI2K13

Currently vCenter appliance lives on the 'SGI2K10' cluster in vCenter in the LA site. We would like to add a 2nd "Site" called 'FL' so it would look like:

Site = LA

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGI2K10

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGISK12

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGI2K13

Site = FL

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGI2K14prod

           |_ _ _ _ Cluster = SGI2K14test

Can someone please tell me if I can do the following:

1. Add a 2nd vCenter instance to the LA site which already runs our soul vCenter appliance in the SGI2K10 cluster as 'fail-over' incase our vCenter appliance becomes corrupt or fails?

2. Can I add vCenter appliance to the new FL site I create and manage it in the primary vCenter appliance running in the LA site?

[rcporto]

Carlos,

To provide High Availability to vCenter on LA site you must use vCenter Server Heartbeat, that will create a clone of you vCenter and replicate all changes of 1st vCenter, and in case of failover, this new clone become active.

And to manage both sites from a single vSphere Client (or Web Client) you must configure Linked Mode between your two vCenter.

[rh5592 · Accepted solution]

1. As Richardson pointed out, If vCenter Heartbeat is the product that provides active/passive failover capability for the vCenter Server. However this product is only available in the Windows version of vCenter Server, NOT for the vCenter Server appliance.

2. vCenter appliance does not support linked mode so you can't do it for now.

[rcporto]

Thank you Rommel... I really missed that Carlos wants to deploy vCSA... and did my recommendation based on Windows version installation.

[Carlos201110141]

Any 3rd party alternatives that support linking vCenter Server Appliance in VMware or do I HAVE TO switch to a M$ platform for this to work?

[rh5592]

As for single pane of glass ability, William Lam wrote an article about it, but keep in mind that it is NOT officially supported http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/09/automatically-join-multiple-vcsa-51.html