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henry857
Contributor
Contributor

Options for clustering vCenter services for sake of redundancy

Hi -

I've been tasked to look into what options I have to add redundancy to our vCenter 5.5 services. I guess I should start with how we are setup.

Single SSO Domain with two sites, physically and logically (SSO Multi-Site configuration)

All vCenter components, including database services (SQL 2008 R2) are installed on a single VM (This is true for both sites)

Linked-Mode is currently setup to allow us to see both vCenter instances from a single pane of glass

All vCenters and hosts are running the latest release/updates of 5.5. Roughly 10 hosts and 40 VM's per site.

I'm aware of setting up HA at each site in case of a host going down. I'm also aware that Fault Tolerance becomes a viable option in vSphere 6.0, since our vCenter VM's sit right at 4 vCPU's per. But I also would like to know what other options are available, and how viable they may be, given our setup. Does anyone have experience using WSFC locally and/or across a WAN link for the vCenter database? What about SSO high availability? Should we even be considering that being such a small site?

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tophe75
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same task and this is the way I will do it.

As we are on a really old version I will do an upgrade to version 6.0U3 and then I will wait for 6.5, then I will move over to VCSA that supports HA negatively.

Here are some good  references:

vCenter Server 6 Deployment Topologies and High Availability - VMware vSphere Blog

http://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vmw-vctr-srvr-deployment-...

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php#upgrade&solution=2

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vcenter-server-heartbeat-65-administration-guide.pdf

In my opinion it is to much fuss to make vCenter HA in version 5.5 or 6.0, the only option is to go for VCSA 6.5 with HA, hoping it will be released soon...

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henry857
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for your feedback. We are also looking into upgrading eventually once 6.5 drops but I was unaware of the nifty new HA tech for VCSA. I dig some more on this and see if it will work for us.

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