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© 2009 VMware Inc. All rights reserved
Confidential
Overview: vCenter Server Heartbeat
Q3 2010
2
Agenda
Why is vCenter Server Availability Important?
What Needs to Be Protected?
Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat
3
vCenter Server: A Key Infrastructure Component
A universal hub for virtualization management
4
How Do You Use vCenter Server?
Monitor cluster, host and VM performance Manage VM and host provisioning Patch and update hosts and VMs Configure and operate VMotion, DRS, HA and FT Provision and manage a VMware VIEW environment Manage disaster recover plans Test / develop VMs and applications Allow access for third party applications
5
Impact of Downtime - External vCenter Applications
7
Chargeback
Site Recovery Manager
1
Lab Manager
2
VIEW Server / Composer
3
CapacityIQ
4
AppSpeed
5
vCloud Director
6vCenter Server
6
Impact of vCenter Server Downtime
Component Impact Experienced
Virtual Machines Management requires direct connections to host; can’t provision new VMs from templates
ESX Servers Management requires direct connections to host
Performance & Monitoring Statistics
Historical records will have gaps during outages, still available via ESX Servers
VMotion / Storage VMotion Unavailable
VMware DRS Unavailable
vCenter Plug - Ins Unavailable
VMware HA HA failover works, admission control unavailable
VMware View Cannot provision new desktop instances
VMware vCloud Director Cannot allocate resources or provision VMs
7
Agenda
Why is vCenter Server Availability Important?
What Needs to Be Protected?
Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat
8
Determining a Strategy
Define the Scope of Protection Desired•Which is most important?
• Local high availability for hardware/network failures?
• Protecting application integrity and uptime against all types of threats?
• Remote disaster recovery for large scale, site-wide outages?
• Is uptime during maintenance windows needed?•What is the recovery time objective?
• Need to base this on what functionality is unavailable during vCenter Server outage
9
How Do You Protect vCenter Server Today?
• No protection
• Keep a backup copy archived
• Cold standby server
• Clustering
• VMware HA
10
Protecting vCenter Server
vCenter
Services
vCenter Inventory
Standard DR Solution
vCenter Server
(Primary)
Replication ofstate files
vCenter Server
(Standby)
Database ServerDatabase Server
11
What is required to restore vCenter functionality?
vCenter Server is an almost stateless application
Data stored in the vCenter database is the most critical resource
Following data is necessary to restore the vCenter functionality (with intact database)
• vCenter server IP Address
• DNS name for ODBC connection
• License files for the License Manager Server
• Security Certificates
• vCenter Configuration file
• vCenter Plug-in data
• Customized data from upgrade directory (if applicable)
12
Agenda
Why is vCenter Server Availability Important?
What Needs to Be Protected?
Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat
13
Solutions for Protecting vCenter Server
• vCenter downtime greatly impacts productivity of VI Administrators
• However, several options can be used to mitigate the potential for vCenter Server downtime
• The solution of choice will depend on level of protection desired and recovery point objectives.
VMware Solutions Third-Party SolutionsVMware HA
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat
Backup
Clustering
Host Replication
14
Overview: VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat
•Extends availability for the vCenter Server platform• Add-on to vCenter Server protects critical components of the
infrastructure
• Deep awareness of all vCenter Server components
• Simple configuration and deployment
• Replicates all data and transactions to a standby server
• Failover of the application and database over the LAN or WAN
• Best-of breed-technology• VMware has selected Neverfail to provide the underlying technology
• Proven technology supports SQL, Exchange, Blackberry availability
• vCenter Server Heartbeat is a VMware product and fully supported by VMware
15
Complete Protection for vCenter Server
Hardware
Failures
Network
Failures
OS
Failures
Application
Failures
QuickTime™ and a decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
QuickTime™ and a decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
vCenter Server
vCenter Server Heartbeat
16
vCenter Server Heartbeat Architecture
Purely software-based solution with no dependencies
Paired Servers with Shared Nothing Architecture
Active/Passive clone
Hardware Agnostic
Physical & Virtual Support
Application Awareness (AMF)
Hardware and Software Redundancy
17
What’s New in vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3
Unified management of multiple nodes
• Manage availability for groups of vCenter Servers from a single UI
• Distributed vCenter Servers and SQL databases can be managed as pairs
Simplified UI
• Tree structure shows overall health and availability status of all servers
• Easier-to-use interface for managing thresholds and alerts in Heartbeat
Extends Heartbeat protection to View Composer
Support for vCenter Server 4.1 and 4.0 Update 2
Improved platform support – native x64, Windows Server 2008 R2
18
vCenter Server Heartbeat: Improved User Interface
Simplified hierarchy view of all protected
services
Status information on Primary Server
19
Comparing vCenter Server Heartbeat
Host Replication
Heartbeat
Hardware & OS failures Yes Yes
Configuration Agnostic Yes Yes
WAN failover Partial Yes
Complexity Medium-High Low
Protects vCenter Server components
No Yes
Network failures No Yes
Deeper more granular protection than other solutions
20
vCenter Server Heartbeat: Defense in Depth
Breadth of workloads supported
Depth of HA
protection
Specific All
Hardware/OS
Complete
VMware HA
vCenter Heartbeat
Replication
Clustering
21
Summary: Why vCenter Server Heartbeat?
High availability for VC is growing in importance for customers running VMware in production
• Underlying infrastructure needs to be fully protected, especially for VDI and cloud environments
• HA provides robust general-purpose protection of virtualized workloads
• Need to protect against configuration errors, network failures, OS failures, database failures with WAN failover support
• Many customers run vCenter Server on a physical server
• Other solutions are expensive, complex and lack app awareness, support for database, WAN failover
• Customers have been asking for a VMware solution that provides more granular availability for vCenter Server
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