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Best Design for PSC HA across two datacentres

We are implementing vSphere 6.5 U1e for a large environment and I am looking at the most appropriate design for the following:-

  • 2 x Datacentres connected by low latency, high and width links
  • A Single SSO Domain - vSphere.local (Linked Mode is required)
  • We will be deploying a separate vCenter appliance into each DC and using vCenter HA in both DC's

We could either have ....

  • 2 x PSC in Datacentre in Site DC1 - use F5 Big IP for PSC HA - SSO Site = DC1
  • 2 x PSC in Datacentre in Site DC2 - use F5 Big IP for PSC HA -  SSO Site = DC2

Issues -

If for some reason both PSC's in a site were down, since 6.5 it is no longer supported to re-point the VCSA appliances to the PSC appliances in another PSC site.

Required 4 x PSC appliances

Is there a better design? Maybe using the F5's to create a VIP across DC's (active Passive)


Regards

Sean

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Wesley_VMware
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Sean,

First up, I do not know the characteristics of the environment you are dealing with nor do I know all the requirements but, this looks like a pretty decent solution.

I don't think you should over-engineer this when it comes to the PSC's. I mean, how likely is it that both PSC's are going to be down in one site? If this happens you probably have a larger outage where the vCenter or even the site is down anyway. If you just make sure you have HA enabled and the anty-affinity rules set for the PSC's you should be fine.

I do want to recommend the use of a ring topology for the PSC's, that way you don't have a single point of failure when it comes to PSC replication. Normally a PSC only replicates with one parter with a ring topology this becomes two parters. Basically you install the PSC's in a specific order and on the last one you change the replication parter to point back at the first one. See this KB on how to do this: https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2127057​.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Wesley

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