Yes you are reading it correctly. Today I was verifying links I added to a document. Both links referred to an MSCS based vCenter Server.
Although not everyone will have an environment where a Clustered vCenter Server is a must there are many where availability of vCenter is critical. To those who vCenter Server running clustered please note the following extract of a newly published KB article:
vCenter Server 4.x has not been qualified with third party clustering products such as Microsoft Clustering Service and Veritas Cluster Services. VMware does not support third party clustering products.
This means that as mentioned in the KB article the only supported method to increase resilience of the vCenter Service currently is VMware Heartbeat.
I know the KB mentions HA as well but from your post it looks as if only VMware Heartbeat is supported.
Or do I interpret this incorrectly ?
Makes sense. VMware charges for heartbeat, they don’t make any money off MSCS.
-Dave
I belive Chris Skinner (my kick ass VI2 ICM instructor) wrote the vCenter clustering document.
Duncan, how many customers do you know of that are providing high availability of vCenter outside of vCenter Heartbeat using either MSCS or Veritas?
@LucD, please note that I was talking about the vCenter Server service! Not the VM itself. HA would be perfect for VM level resiliency but currently not for service level resiliency.
@Jason : I know many who use MSCS. Reason usually being that MSCS is their standard for App level clustering.
its been a while since my 3.5 class, but is hosting the DB off box on an SQL Cluster supported?
Yes Dave that is supported.
What’s all the fuss about MSCS? Its a primitive option at best. Just SAN boot your vCenter server and set up array based snapshots.
Not Support/Not qualified is not the same thing.
I’m going to play around with this in a lab, but my bet is that you can do it, but either they haven’t got around to qualifying it yet or it will be an unsupported option.
The KB states that “VMware does not support third party clustering products” but in the vSphere 4.1 “Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service” guide we can read the following sentence clearly “VMware® vSphere supports clustering using MSCS across virtual machines”.
Yes Carlos but those are two different things
1) clustering of virtual machines on ESX/vSphere
2) clustering of the product vCenter
I’m sure you can get vCenter to work with MSCS, but they clearly state they are not going to support any MSCS issues. If something goes wrong, VMware just directs you to get with Microsoft (and the endless vendor loop begins). Maybe there is a way to get vCenter to work on windows 95, but I’m sure VMware won’t support it. I like VMware Heartbeat, it has some cool features. I can’t knock them for the change, it’s just another way for a business to make money.
It’s a shame VMware don’t support vCenter with a 1 vCPU configuration. That way you could protect vCenter by using FT. They could stipulate that they will only support this configuration if the vCenter database is installed on a clustered\resilient server and not installed locally on the FT enabled vCenter VM. Obviously this configuration would make the need for VMware Heartbeat obsolete so it would never happen.
Hi Duncan,
Nice information!
I believe there is a slight change here. Further to statement of third party clustering solutions, there is some more info….
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1024051
“VMware will provide support for any issues encountered with an environment that uses third party solutions for protecting against VMware vCenter Server downtime. However if your issue is deemed to be related to the third party clustering solution, VMware will refer to our third-party software policy.”
Which mean, cross product support for customer still exists. Means, vmware will provide support for vCenter server downtime, if the issue is with MSCS, then customer has to run through MS which is nothing but cross product support.
So bottom line, we CAN set it up!
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