Hi,
We are currently using vCenter Heartbeat to secure our vCenter setup, but as of a couple of weeks ago VMware has putthis product into EOL and EOS. This made us look in to other ways to protect our vCenter Server (It is getting more and more important since we rely on it for backup with Veeam), so I am looking here for some suggestions on how to get similar protection for our vCenter Server.
One of my ideas was to reuse the current hardware and set up a VMware cluster based on shared storage, and run the vcenter architecture on that setup. At the moment we are running vCenter 5.1 Update 1c, and I have identified the following components that needs protection:
- Active Directory (Spread out on VMs on different clusters and storage arrays at the moment)
- Microsoft SQL database
- SSO Service
- Web Client
- vCenter Server
- Update Manager
I was thinking about setting it up as below:
2xVM for AD
2xVM for SSO HA
2xVM for MSSQL with SQL Mirroring
1xVM with vCenter Server and Web Client
1xVM with Update Manager
The plan would be to have both shared storage and local storage on the ESX hosts, and then put the single VM on the shared storage and the redundant functions on the local servers. This design is supposed to support 1000 VMs at start, and grow to up to 5000VMs.
Is it possible to migrate from where we are now to this new setup? We are using dvSwitches and need the history in the database, so the idea was to reuse the existing database (although on a new SQL Server).
I appreciate any feedback you may have on this.