Hearbeat Best Practices ?

[rbrads]

Hi,

Does anyone know of any Vmware HeartBeat Best Practices documents available from vmware or otherwise ?

I had a quick google around but couldnt get anything.

Thanks

[dmihaescu]

Are you looking for something specific?

The install guide and admin guide should give you all the information you need: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/heartbeat_pubs.html

[iri_vm]

hi,

There aren't any Best Practices for this...

Anyway some Lessons Learned could be very helpfull. because the install of this product it's a very odd one. If you deviate just little from the install guide everything gets stuck, and you have to rebuild all again.

Irinee

[rbrads]

Hi dmihaescu,

I was just wonderinf if there was any recommended timeouts but i think this will be specific to my environment network latency etc.

Thanks for the link.

Ryan

[MatthewShort]

My experience with a WAN setup, I can recommend the following (assuming you have firewalls between sites).

• The NIC you dedicate to channel traffic MUST be at a minimum of 1Gbps and the WAN link must be a minimum 1Gbps, in the case of a Seperate SQL server, the 1Gbps remains true, however vCenter Server (with no local DB) works fine over 100Mbps
  
• Allow the 2 IP addresses from the Primary Site (Non Channel NIC) and the 2 IP Address at the Secondary Site (Non Channel NIC) to talk to each other over ICMP and Standard CIFS ports
  
• Allow the Channel IP from the Primary Site and Secondary site to talk to each over 57348 TCP AND ICMP.   *Even though it doesn't state this in the documenation we noticed the Channel traffic talking over 57348 and denying ping requests, replication did not occur until we opened this up on the firewalls
  
• Test and Triple check that the service account you set to do the DNS changes can actually peform DNS changes
  

If anyone is keen to, let me know, I would  more than happy to post my installation guide for a WAN setup (the documentation provided by VMware can be a little bit confusing).  I setup a virtutal - to - virtual implemenation of Heartbeat over a WAN with vCenter and a seperate SQL server.

[VM_]

Hi Matthew,

I would be more than keen to get a copy of your installation guide for a WAN setup. I'd like to review my setup against another as I'm having a few issues with the services not starting after a failure on the Secondary (as the active server).

Thanks,

[westyuk1]

Matthew, I'd like to see your guide also. I partly used this as reference for our WAN non-identical setup

http://virtualweisslacker.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/vcenter-heartbeat-63-u1-how-to-for-non.html

The VMware documentation is not very clear in several areas.