Clustered vCenter?

azjag

Is anybody running vCenter in a physical cluster. My next task is to get this setup and am running into some conflicting stories. The three support people at VMWare I have talked to say it's not supported, the consultant who is a VCDX says it can be done and the google searches I have done are hit and miss. Bottom line I don't want to setup and configure 2 physical boxes, cluster them, configure vCenter and have them setup at our Main DC and the Hot DR site. If you have done it what was your experience setting it up.

We looked at heartbeat and wasn't impressed. That and we can do clustering for free whereas we would need to pay for heartbeat. We are also looking to do this to get vCenter out of the virtual environment since it is a high resource item.

astorrs

It works and is supported, but not certified, which means as long as they don't believe the problem you're experiencing is related to it you'll get support. If they think it might be the cause of the problem they'll tell you to call Microsoft.

You may choose to protect VMware vCenter Server using third-party clustering solutions including, but not limited to, MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Services) and VCS (Veritas Cluster Services). VMware does not certify these third party solutions. VMware will provide support for any issues encountered with an environment that uses third party solutions for protecting against VMware vCenter Server downtime. However if your issue is deemed to be related to the third party clustering solution, VMware will refer to our third-party software policy.

Source: VMware KB: Supported vCenter Server high availability options

With all that in mind, I'm not a fan of physical vCenter's. Are you doing synchronous replication to your Hot DR site? Remember a failure of the vCenter server at your DC without the loss of the DC will mean you're running your apps in the DC yet VC in the Hot DR site - could be ugly if your storage is even capable of supporting it. Why not virtualize it and use SRM along with another vCenter instance in the DR site. Makes DR testing almost fun, instead of the P.I.T.A. it usually is.