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khairulnizam
Contributor
Contributor

vCenter on MSCS.

Hi,

have anyone implement this as I need to know few things:

1. Licensing?

2. Any issue encounter?

3. Other...?

thanks for the reply and comments.

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

Running vCenter on MSCS will on protect the MsSQL only. The application service is still not protected.

The other option would be vCenter Heartbeat (all components via Neverfail engine) or VMware HA. More info on the KB. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102405...

Any reason why do you need to MSCS for vCenter? VMware HA is good enough for most cases.


iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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khairulnizam
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Sadly it happen to me where EVA of the datastore hosting the vCenter VMDK having issue and this has cause the vCenter not available more than 1 days. Impact are more toward the VM owner as their not able to login to the vCenter to verify their VM.

So I am looking at a solution where it can eliminate dependency on the datastore and for the DB it will be point to external database (physical cluster).

www.vmware.com/pdf/VC_MSCS.pdf

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

Even with microsoft cluster it would only be on DB level and left the OS and Application unprotected. I would suggest you looking into vCenter Heartbeat.


iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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khairulnizam
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I also looking at MSCS at application layer. Maybe attach diagram will able to describe.

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Blithespirit
Contributor
Contributor

MSCS works fine as long as you are aware of the limitations of the cluster, you cannot use DRS with MSCS and licensing could also be an issue. bus sharing means no Migrations hot, so realistically does MSCS meet your needs? I have just set a cluster up and it works great plus uses SRM 4.1 for failover. I know it does not protect the nodes but my data is more important. alternative is just using a single VM and relying on HA with no application protection or expensive heartbeat for the ultimate protection.

Real things to think about.

No DRS

Bus sharing so no migrations

Raw device mappings

No node protection outside of VMware HA

Licensing from MS can be expensive if the nodes move as must be covered on each host if migrations expected

Hope this helps and it does work well for me

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Blithespirit
Contributor
Contributor

Maybe I missed the point a bit but if you intent to MSCS vCenter then think of the cost and is vCenter a cluster aware product?

Outside hearbeat MSCS I cannot see how this would work. vCenter databases are linked by a GUID, each vCenter has its own GUID, if you failed over to a different node 'vCenter' it would have a new GUID for the database and therefore not work anyway. access would be denied to the other node GUID data. Hosts would also not be available on second node as they would be two distinct entities.

This is my understanding anyway it could be wrong. also need two vCenter licenses

Best protection would be a replica of vCenter in some 3rd party replication to another datastore, if you lose the first vCenter import and use the replica.

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khairulnizam
Contributor
Contributor

I am looking for this document but not able to find it.

“Reference Implementation: Clustering vCenter Server 4.0 Using Microsoft Cluster Services”.

Seem like it no longer available at the VIOPS site.

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

About HA solution for vCenter Server see also:

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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