High Availability / Clustering for Virtual Center Server?

[beneddt]

Hi Folks,

I was wondering if anyone has done any research / testing on how to accomplish a high availability solution for a physical Virtual Center server. Can it be clustered under MSCS?, Veritas? Others? I've seen where some people have placed the Virtual Center server into the ESX farm as a Virtual Machine, however our clients are a bit apprehensive about doing this (to say the least). Are there any other options or solutions that have been discussed? (Search didn't turn up anything relavant)

Thanks,

db

[Troy_Clavell]

my opionion is to ensure you have a well protected database with a great maintenance plan. Clustering the DB server would be better protection in my opinion. If you lost the VCMS host, what are you really losing? You still have running VM's and access to the hosts running the VM's.

With that said, here is a whitepaper on clustering VC.

hope this helps.

[bradley4681 · Accepted solution]

I would run the virtual center on an ESX cluster and then connect it's database to a clustered server. BAM, High Availability!

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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[beneddt]

Troy....thanks so much for the whitepaper, I'll go through it this week and test it out in our lab environment.

Brad, we are also clustering the SQL database. The client is just wondering if there are HA options available for the VC server itself.

thanks!

D

[bradley4681]

Other then the scenario's that we've mention, VMware doesn't have any HA for VC specifically. Mainly because VC is not critical for the function of ESX and you can rebuild a VC in just a few minutes as long as the database is clustered, or on another server thats not affected.

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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