Here is the situation: My customer has mutiple remote sites each with a 2 node ESXi 5 cluster running about a dozen VM's. Each site also has a Backup Server running Windows which HAS to be bare iron because VMware doesn't support tape drives any more (no SCSI passthrough). The whole thing is managed centrally with vCenter Server.
We have a new bit of cluster software that needs a 3rd VM that does quorum sensing so the 2 instances running one each on the 2 ESXi nodes don't get split brain in the case of some failure. We'd like to run it on the Backup server on top of either VMPlayer or Workstation 8 to save the cost of an entire server for one tiny miniscule little lightwieght VM. The communications to the sites aren't universally good enough to run the quorum VM's centrally (poor latency at times) which would defeat the point of it.
However, I can't find any mention of whether that VM will be visible to vCenter Server. I don't expect VMPlayer to be visible, so that is no big deal, but what about Workstation 8? There is lots of documentation in the Workstation 8 manuals about being able to grab and run VM's from ESX and vCenter server, but zero discussion about whether this is visible from vCenter.
Has anyone with vCenter done an Add Host of a VM running in a Windows hosted Workstation 8 environment? I'd love to see a screenshot of it if anyone has.
The ancillary piece to this is that we need to automate restarting the quorum VM somewhere else if the Backup server goes down. I'm sure we could kludge something together, but it would be way better if it was a standard HA integration with vCenter. For that, vCenter has to see it...
Thanks!
