Last week there was a discussion on vCenter availability on twitter. The main outcome was that vCenter is an important component of your infrastructure and needs to be highly available. Coincidentally I received the request to repost this Survey about vCenter Availability and your thoughts on it. This is your chance to define the future around vCenter availability, take the survey today!
VMware vCenter is the critical management platform for virtualization and cloud management. Ensuring vCenter is highly available during planned and unplanned outages is essential to make sure there is a minimal impact to your business productivity and you continue to meet your service level agreements.
This survey is about understanding your vCenter’s availability needs. We would like to understand your current needs, feedback on vCenter Server Heartbeat and your future needs.
There are total 17 questions in this survey. This survey should not take more than 5-7 minutes. We appreciate your time in taking this survey. Your feedback is very important to us!
I like the basic line of inquiry in this survey. My overall question remains which is this, is there any way of migrating a VCenter server to a different server with OUT using the Vcenter heartbeat configuration. The problem with the heartbeat configuration for this approach (besides the complexity and having to p2v the source host if i understand the configuration,) is that this solution is resource intensive (multiple nics,) configuuration intensive (hot standby, same host names, IP’s) and fraught with potential interference with production systems (name and IP conflicts.) It has been suggested to me to migrate the databases, but I still think these are host name/IP dependent. And if there are other approaches, the have not been easy to find googling. Maybe my searches are just for the wrong words. Very vexing though.
Some of the concerns you mention are addressed in Heartbeat release 6.3 update 1 that came out last month… Might want to look into it and see if it fits your needs.
The current issue with vCenter and availability is not necessarily solved with products like Heartbeat.
The availability of the actual database can be a serious issue if erroneous entries are added by the vCenter software which can cause the service to fail. Any database updates are immediately replicated via Heartbeat so the corruption is not avoided.
I’ve written more about this:
http://www.wooditwork.com/2010/11/25/why-vcenter-is-letting-vmwares-side-down/
I have always said no matter what the vCenter availability the DB can always be the endpoint. Even if it is MS SQL or Oracle RAC, both have outage issues. In most cases it is as simple as the filesystems filling up because the DBA’s are not watching them or refuse to allow growth. I think just looking at vCenter is only part of the problem, the DB’s need to get a lot of care and feeding and they usually are neglected like the redheaded stepchild.
Also vCenter Server heartbeat doesn’t support RAC. I was just looking into this because in our config the only reason we want vCenter to be highly available is for Composer. Does Symantec’s ApplicationHA support a vCenter that backends to Oracle? The Db is a RAC so only looking for vCenter side.