High Availablity for Vcenter

[morbidz]

Scenario:

Site where Vcenter is is located gos down. How do you manage your clusters?

[weinstein5]

Depends is vcenter running as a VM - if it is VMware HA will still work and vcenter should restart - if it is a physical machine you will have to rebuild the vcenter box or you could have used converter to create a vm that is an exact copy of the vcenter server - of course all this assumes that the vcenter database is available because it is to the vcenter database that all information, including the clusters, about your vcenter environment is stored -

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[morbidz]

vcenter server is a physical.

DB is mirrored to another site.

My concern is that when the primary site where the vcenter server is goes down, I need to rebuild the box in the DR site, but since IP will change every single esx host would need the updated IP info.

Is it possible to use DNS name in /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg instead of the IP address for vcenter?

[jmcdonald1]

I do not believe that setting a DNS name will work. I believe the <serverIp> parameter will be invalid unless it has an IP in it.

Personally I prefer either having a Microsoft MSCS cluster with one node at each site, or having an offline hot backup in the second site so that you can simply turn it on and it will use the replicated/mirrored/restored database. With SQL mirrioring/replication (which i am only versed on the theory) it is possible that the databse can be replicatied as well. This is a pretty complex DR scenario though.

This said, VMware recognized that customers were wanting redundancy for vCenter. Thus we now have a product called VMware vCenter Heartbeat which will provide this functionality. Information can be found:

Cheers,

/Jonathan

[CRSquiers]

Does vCenter Heartbeat require the creation of multiple vCenter servers similar to how MSCS requires 2 or more installations of Windows Server? I guess what I really want to know is "do I need to purchase multiple licenses of Microsoft Server to support vCenter Heartbeat?".