heartbeat over WAN - how to setup the remote servers?

[ESX-Q]

currently my vi3 env is: (700 vm)

physical VC ver 2.5

SQL on a separate machine - actually on Microsoft Cluster also Physical (64 bit)

my goal is to upgrade the env to vSphere and to use VC heartbeat on a DR remote site.

I know that heartbeat currently does not support 64 bit and also not cluster.

so i"m thinking of creating a parallel VC (version 4) as a VM (so i willl be able to clone it easly to the DR)

and to create the SQL DB on a physical non cluster, 32 bit. (or maybe it will be ok as a VM?)

now I need to know how to setup the remote servers in the DR,

I will clone the VC, but how can the heartbeat of the sec NIC should be set? as if i"ll put gateway etc...than the VC name will probably have a conflict (if it was on LAN than I could use a point to point with no gateway but how to do it over wan?)

also how to set the remote SQL? should I clone it as well? (i kbow that I will have to run the setup on the 4 servers)

another thing, the recommandation of vmware is to put the update manager on a different server than the VC...so is that means that I should/can clone that server to the DR too? and can I install the heardbeat on that one too? (meaning 6 installations ?)

TIA

[justinking]

ESX-Q

vCS Heartbeat will clone the server whether it is physical or virtual however when the second server is virtual you can use vCenter cloning or products like converter. If you were to build a vCenter 4.0 VM, you can clone this to the DR site and then install heartbeat on both. The vmware channel will need to be on a seperate subnet/vlan to the application on both sides but this can be routable. You are correct that you do not need a gateway for the vmware channel in either LAN or WAN configurations, however for a WAN configuration, you will add a persistent route to the route table or setup RRAS on each server. You basically tell it to, get to destination, use this interface and goto this gateway, there should be a KB on the vmware support site. Windows networking does not work reliable with multiple gateways so we have to manually specify it. The second servers will need to have the IP adresses changed to local subnets and the necessary routing in place to communicate. Leave the vmware channel connected as NetBIOS will be disabled, however you need to leave the application interface disconnected into install to prevent conflicts. There is a preinstall requirements documented as well as a install video that shows the entire process of both pre cloned or install cloned methods on the vmware website.

Depending on how many hosts your are running you can relocate the SQL database locally to vCenter or run it remotley (physical or virtual), if you do keep it remotely, you will repeat the clone process and install onto the SQL Server pair but select protection of SQL only.

Update manager will be installed onto the vCenter server however the repository can be located on a seperate server, vCS Heartbeat will protect the plugin but by default not the repository. You would have to use an alternative replication product for this, I suppose you could use vCS Heartbeat on the server and just replicate the file locations of the repository and this would be a third pair or six servers total.

X64 support for Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 will be out with update 2 of vCS Heartbeat in early September

Please let me know if you need further discussion on this

Justin King

Product Specialist - VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

[RobMokkink]

Hi Justin,

We have the repository for VUM protected as well. We created a seperate data filter for that.

[justinking]

RobMokkink yes the repository will be protected if stored in the default location, however as you noted it can be relocated locally and protected by adding a replication filter, however if the repository is seperate to the vCenter server, you will need to look at another instance of heartbeat if this is required to be replicated.

Justin King

Product Specialist - VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

[Rajhyd]

Useful info guys!!

I'm thinking about the implementation of vcenter server Heartbeat across WAN. What IP will be used in vpxa.cfg file for vcenter server after implementing vcenter serevr heartbeat across WAN if primary and secondry vcenter server are in different subnet?

After failover to secondry vcenter do we need to update vpxa.cfg file of all ESX servers so that vcenter can communicate with all ESX servers? Also, how to change vcenter serverr communicates with ESXi host?

Thanks and Regards,

Raj

[justinking]

Raj, the heartbeat product has built in technology to keep the correct IP configured in VPXA. When a failover or swithover occurs, Heartbeat will 1, update the DNS hostname with the correct IP to maintain user and application connectivity and 2, update the VPXA of each connected host with the new IP address of vCenter so the hosts remain connected.

Additional info on a WAN configuration is you will need the channel subnet to be able to comunicate with the secondary site channel subnet (network routing) and recommended 1mb of available bandwidth, however compression can be enbled if less is present.

Justin King

Product Specialist - VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat