Virtualised Virtual Centre

[Guv]

I have a quick question on having a virtual centre server (VC) running on a virtual machine .  If HA is enabled on a cluster and the ESX host which has the virtualised virtual centre goes down, will the vm's on that esx host still power off and power on to the other esx hosts as the virtual VC will be down due to the host.

Any ideas

[Troy_Clavell]

Guv wrote:

I have a quick question on having a virtual centre server (VC) running on a virtual machine .  If HA is enabled on a cluster and the ESX host which has the virtualised virtual centre goes down, will the vm's on that esx host still power off and power on to the other esx hosts as the virtual VC will be down due to the host.

Any ideas

Yes.  HA is only dependant on vCenter for the initial configuration.  I would however suggest setting your restart priority to high for your vCenter VM.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

HA works independent of vCenter, so it can be down and HA will work as expected.

Good Luck!

[a_p_]

Yes, they will. vCenter Server is only needed to configure HA on the hosts.

André

[bulletprooffool]

HA installs as a service on the ESX hosts and runs independently of the VC, so loss of the node running the VC does not prevent the VM being started on a different host.

the only remaining problem is something like a power outage that brings all ESX hosts in a cluster down.

You can of course tell the ESX hosts to start VMs when the hosts restart, but that does not alleviate the problem of the VC and dependencies.

Here is a script that with a little configuration will identoify the hosts in a cluster hosting the various services dependencies (provided you configure it) and start up VMs in sequence, waiting for services to be running before starting the next VM.

http://www.get-virtual.info/2011/02/25/script-of-the-day-find-and-start-vc-in-dr/