Upgrading vCenter with Heartbeat

[blomoff]

We have 2 sites, both running vcenter 5.0. They are protected by heartbeat.

We are looking to upgrade to vcenter 6.x, obviously heartbeat is not supported. So what options do we have? Both in terms of replacement, and the upgrade path?

Has anyone else done this, surely some people must have

Thanks

[rcporto]

The first steps is remove the vCenter server Heartbeat, see how: Uninstalling VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.4 and later (2014202) | VMware KB

And the next step is to upgrade to vCenter server 6, and for vCenter high availability you can consider the following:

1) Use vSphere HA to protect the vCenter virtual machine;

2) Use vSphere FT (Fault Tolerance) to to protect the vCenter virtual machine;

3) Use the native vCenter HA, but you will need vCenter version 6.5.

For additional high availability options, see: Supported vCenter Server High Availability Options (1024051) | VMware KB

[blomoff]

Thanks, so in a nutshell,

1. Uninstall heartbeat from both servers (Thus breaking the "protection" between the sites?)
2. Upgrade to vcenter 6 on oth site vCenter servers
3. Upgrade all hosts to 6
4. At this point everything is upgraded to the required levels - Look into the HA options and configure

What is the difference between vSphere HA and vCenter HA? How does this option differ from heartbeat etc?

I was reading an article about multiple, mutisite PSCs the other day, basically leveraging 4 PSCs in a ring topology, 2 in each site with the replication agreements configured as below:

Using this sort of method should still protect a single PSC and entire site from failure. A vCenter server installed in both sites with HA, and or FT configured