Is it possible to have two vCenter Servers running at the same time?

[773gb3003]

Just checking to see if it's possible to have two vCenter Server installs running at the same time, connecting to the same database (on a different server).

If it is possible, we'd like to give it a try -- having one as a VM in our production farm and one as a VM on a different host altogether. We've had vcenter server service logon issues after power failures in our environment, where the service doesn't start when the server restarts. Then we have to logon to each host individually to determine where the vCenter Server is located to restart the service manually by reentering the password for the logon account. My manager is not happy about this, and I can't lock down access to the hosts if I have to keep logging into each host when this happens!

Anyway, is this possible and what would I have to do to have it work correctly?

Thanks.

[Troy_Clavell]

yes, it's possible to have two vCenter Servers running in your environment, however, they cannot share the same DB instance, they must have their own.

Also, an ESX(i) host can only be managed by a single instance as well. Same goes for VUM. VUM can only manage a single instance as well.

If you have vCenter4 on both instances, you can use linked mode to give you a single viewing point, but each instance still has to be managed seperatly.

[hstagner]

Hello 773gb3003,

What Troy said is correct. You cannot have two vCenter servers connect to the same database instance or manage the same ESX(i) hosts. You may want to look at vCenter Server Heartbeat.

Also, I would suggest that you disable "DRS" on your vCenter server VM so that you always know where the vCenter VM is located unless its host fails.

I hope this helps.

Don't forget to mark this answer "correct" or "helpful" if you found it useful (you'll get points too).

Regards,

Harley Stagner

VCP3, VCP4

[yann_bizeul]

I heard that you can use microsoft cluster service to provide vCenter HA capability, (make a MSCS cluster of two windows running vCenter), but you have to provide another HA mechanism for the database (I'm sure there are solution to cluster SQL server instances out there)

This would provide full redundancy, but at cost...

Don't forget the vCenter server is not mandatory, and it is usually an acceptable point of failure.