Session INF4945
Why is vCenter HA important?
- Primary administrative console
- Critical component in end-to-end cloud provisioning
- Foundation for VDI
- Backup and DR solutions rely on vCenter
- vCenter target availability is 99.99% from VMware’s design perspective (5 min a month)
Make every layer of the vCenter stack HA
- vCenter DB
- Host
- SAN
- Network
- DC power and cooling
Reduce dependencies to improve nines
- In moving from 5.1 and 5.5 to 6.0 you see a consolidation of vCenter services into VMs (e.g. just PSC and vCenter in 6.0)
- vCenter 5.5 U3 supports SQL AAGs
- vCenter 6.0 U1 supports SQL AAGs
Hardware/Host Failure protection: vSphere HA
- Test tested solution
- Protects against hardware failures
- Some downtime for failover
- Easy to setup and manage
- DRS rules can be leveraged
- High restart priority for vCenter components
Hardware/host failure protection: vSphere FT
- Continuous availability with zero downtime and data loss
- vCenter tested with FT for 4 vCPUs or less (only the ‘tiny’ and ‘small’ deployments fit)
- About 20% overhead
- Downtime during guest OS patching
Application failure protection: Watchdog
- Watchdog monitors and protects vCenter applications
- Automatically enabled on install on VCSA and Windows
- On failure watchdog attempts to restart processes, if restart fails then VM is rebooted
- Separate watchdog per vCenter server component
Application failure protection: Windows Server Failover clustering
- Provides protection against OS level and application downtime
- Provides protection for database
- Some downtime during failure
- Reduces downtime during OS patching
- Tested with vCenter 5.5 and 6.0
Platform Services Controller HA
- Two models: Embedded PSC or external PSC
- PSC high availability in 6.0 requires a third party load balancer (removed in future vSphere versions)
- Multiple PSC nodes in same site
vCenter Backup
- Backup both embedded PSC and external PSC configurations
- Recover from failures to vCenter node, PSC node or both
- When vCenter node restored, it connects to PSC and reconciles the differences
- When PSC node restored, it replicates from the other nodes
- Uses VADP
- Out-of-the box integration with VMware VDP
Tech Preview (vSphere 6.1?): Native HA
- Native active-passive HA
- Uses witness
- No third party technology needed
- Recover in minutes (target is 15 minutes), not hours
- Protects against hardware, host and application failures
- No shared storage required
- 1-click automated HA setup
- Fully integrated into the product
- Out of box for the VCSA
