Duplicate vCenter Servers?

[KGoch]

In various posts across the community I have seen mentions of people having two vCenter Servers setup. Both were setup as duplicates to provide redundancy in case one went down, you wouldnt lose critical VM functions. However I can not find any documentation on how to this, much less any info. I would imagine its out there somewhere.

And also a slightly related topic but not really, I have seen too that some people do not recommend running Update Manager on your vCenter Server. Just wondering why that was.

Thanks!

[weinstein5]

One thing to remember is VC is a orixy so if you lose VC your VMs will continue to run with out a problem you just will lose the VC Addons like DRS and vMotion - now on to your question about duplicate vCenter servers the key piece to accomplising this is the vCenter database because that is where all the critical infomration is stored - so you can have vCenter servers set up pointing to same datastore - the backup is powered off and only powered on when the priimary fails -

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[KGoch]

Whats the thought on running the spare Vcenter server as a VM? Or would that be bad?

Also whats the general recovery function if the first vCenter goes down? Turn on the second vCenter server, disconnect all hosts from the original vCenter Server and reconnect to the secondary one?

Also any recommendations on running Update Manager as its own machine or on the vCenter server.

[weinstein5]

It is the database that is critical in any recovery of a vCenter failure - because that is where the information about your virtual center environment is stored - so if your concern is failure of the vCenter server and have access to the database sevrer then it is very easy - have a second vCenter server - easiest is to use converter and create an exact copy in a VM so the so ODBC connectors, IP and Host name are thesame - when there is a failure of the primary vCenter server bring up the VM vCenter server it will already be configured with ODBC connector and will connect to the VC database and your environment will be back - no need to readd the hosts to the environment -

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[Troy_Clavell]

I agree with David in that the DB is the most important part of your vCenter instance.

With that said, you may want to look at VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

[azn2kew]

If this is truly for redundancy purpose, you can have both instances of vCenter server running utilize the vCenter heartbeat to monitor them. Otherwise, you have the option to use vCenter server configuring MSCS or other Neverfail product. If its just for quick respond to vCenter failured, I would createa P2V Converter make a copy of vCenter in a VM and power them off until you need it. Again, the most precious part of vCenter server is the settings and configurations of ESX environment the "database" that needs to be backup on daily basis or use SQL 2005 cluster, log shipping whatever your DBA folks used. Reinstall vCenter server from scratch takes about 30 minutes assuming you have DB to restore from. I haven't try Fault Tolerance feature on vSphere 4.0 specific to vCenter 4.0 server in virtual machine wondering if it supported.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant