Plain Virtualization

Recently, I got into a discussion with my colleague regarding vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) and a good discussion on the area where VCHA could be of use. Before we start, I like to summarize the few questions that always got asked during my course of work and as well when I teach vSphere Install, Configure and Manage course. What is VCHA use for? It is really meant for local site availability. Where a lost of vCenter Server can create an outage to other management components where vSphere HA RTO is not sufficient or vSphere HA is not possible to bring up the vCenter Server. Can VCHA be used in a stretched cluster setup and how should we plan to place the nodes? Yes. You will definitely have two sites in a stretched setup. And if you like to have VCHA implement in such a setup, you will need to have a 3rd site or minimal a separate cluster at the passive node site. Typically you will have active node at site 1, and passive node with witness node at site 2 where witness node is...

With the release of vCenter 6.5, a built-in native High Availability (HA) feature was introduced. This has been a long-awaited feature since the end of availability  of vCenter Server Heartbeat since vCenter 5.x. With the release of VCHA, I came across many times people asking how can we implement it? There are a few articles from VMware that show some of the supported topologies. However, with the realize of vSphere 6.7 U2, the recommended vCenter Server deployment is with embedded PSC. In this case, we will just look at the topology that has an embedded PSC. This is welcoming since we have less component to handle and need not require a load balancer just to load balance PSC. Let us go through some of the common questions been asked. How many instances does VCHA deploy? With VCHA, you would have three instances of vCenter namely: vCenter Server  (Active), vCenter Server (Passive), vCenter Server (Witness). How many vCenter Server licenses do I need and which edit...