Jason Boche is definitely going for that top ten blogs lists by Eric Siebert. Jason has been releasing high quality blogs over the last couple of week, keep it up!
I just noticed his latest addition:”
Make VirtualCenter highly available with VMware Virtual Infrastructure“. Which is a great article on the advantages of virtualizing your VirtualCenter server. Jason wasn’t the only one that picked up this “trend”, so did this “newcomer” and colleague Dave Lawrence aka VMGuy. (Newcomer in the blogosphere.)
Like always I’ve got my own view on making VirtualCenter, or should I say vCenter, highly available. I fully agree with both gents to use the VirtualInfrastructure technology to achieve this. I’m no big fan of Microsoft Clustering Services for this purpose.
When virtualizing VirtualCenter remember a couple of things:
- Disable DRS(Change Automation Level!) for your VirtualCenter VM and make sure to document where the VirtualCenter server is located (My suggestion would be the first ESX Box)
- Enable HA for the VirtualCenter server, and set the startup priority to high
- Make sure the VirtualCenter server gets enough resources by setting the shares “high”, and maybe even set reservations
- Make sure VirtualCenter starts up automatically when a power cut occurs (Configuration, Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown)
- Make sure other services and servers that VirtualCenter relies on are also starting automatically, with a high priority and in the correct order like:
- Active Directory
- DNS
- SQL
- At Least 2GB of Memory and 1 CPU
I know most of these best practices are documented here and pretty obvious, but somehow they are often overlooked. Especially number 1,4 and 5. Why are these important?
Well when a complete site fails, which will be a stressful situation, you don’t want to spend time looking on every single ESX host if the VirtualCenter was located there before the power cut. With DRS enabled it can and probably will be vmotioned around the environment and you need to start it from the command line with “vmware-cmd” when for some reason HA or the automatic startup fails. This can only be done on the host where the VM was located before the power cut / isolation.
So again, I do advise to virtualize your VirtualCenter Server, but make sure you know where the VirtualCenter Server resides at all time and write procedures for booting the environment manually!