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...

Recently, assisted one of my customer to troubleshoot a failed Windows vCenter Server resulted from an upgrade failure. What you would need is all the credential accounts such as vCenter SSO, Windows Administrator and your MS SQL account. Also a copy of your existing vCenter Server database. We logged a case with VMware support and gone through the logs. Refer to the logs location here . The one major log would be the vmdird.log. This was showing error 49. The VMware Service Lifecycle Manager service remain freeze at Starting status. This will run a vmon process in your task manager. Check out the all services name here . For those not aware, starting from vCenter Server 6.5, the vCenter Server Services are no longer a standalone services. We spend a lot of time trying to reinstall, and running through kb fixes but it did not help. We decided to do a uninstall and encounter error 1603. We were not able to get over this error.  Instead, we did another vCenter Server installation on ...