Simplistic failover test for Virtual Centre

[Kevin_Hamilton]

Hello all, I am due to do a test of bringing Virtual Centre up in a second location in the event the first had a major issue.  I think I may have missed a step or 2 and was wondering if someone could advise me on my plan below.

Virtual Centre is running on Windows 2008 Server R2 within a VM Guest.  VMware infrastructure is ESXi 4.1.

Backend database is on SQL 2008 on another VM Guest.

Have a secondary SQL 2008 VM Guest configured on secondary site with SQL mirroring for the VC Database.

My simple plan was to install Virtual Centre onto a VM Guest at secondary site and point it to the mirrored copy of the database sitting on already configured SQL server.

Having some thoughts though as to what implications there maybe due to the change in Server name for the Virtual Centre guest.  Is there anything else I may have missed.  It suddenly just seems to simple for this to work easily.

Regards

H

[rothb]

Hi Kevin,

you have to make sure that your SSL Certs, IP Address, hostname of the second vCenter Server are the same as on the first. Otherwise you have to reconnect all esx(i) hosts in case of a disaster to the new vCenter Server. Keep vCenter Server Versions in sync otherwise you will run into problems connecting to the DB.

This is a ugly way of implementing a failover vCenter with many manual steps to be taken, if you can afford you should try vCenter Heartbeat instead.

I didn´t recommend doing this.

Best regards,

Bjoern

[Kevin_Hamilton]

Hello Bjoern, thanks for the response mate.

As I suspected the more I thought about it my simplistic plan is going to fail at the first hurdle.  Unfortunately there is no budget to implement VMware Heartbeat.  I had wrongly thought the most important aspect would be the database and if I ensured I had an up to date copy of this I could install Virtual Centre onto a new server in a different location with a different IP Address as is the case I have and the database would populate Virtual Centre and change links to point to new Server name and IP Address.

Back to the drawing board, as you said I can just re-add in the ESXi Hosts I have in the locations in the environment bit of a pain but only 16 Hosts in total but looks like I will lose the histoical data kept on the original database which is a real shame.

Regards

H