VCenter and High Availability Option

[emunn]

Got this question from a user today and wondered if anyone in the forums may know an answer:

We recently bought the Vmware training module and need something clarified about VCenter and the high availability option. I am going to have 2 physical sites. Each site will have an iSCSI array. One site will have three servers and one will have 5 servers. If I purchase one VMware vCenter Server license with the High availability option will I be able to manage both sites with the single VMware VCenter license and be able to do High availability at both sites independently(I know you can’t do high availability across a WAN or between data centers). In other words do I have to have a Vcenter server at each site to do high availability or can I do high availability at both sites with a single vmware VCenter server managing both sites and data centers?

Also with the new VSphere products coming out on the 21st – one of the options is Data recovery. So pretty much the same question as above, do I need two VCenter servers or can I do Data recovery with just one server managing two sites?

[David Davis]

Technically, this is a question for your VMware account manager and SE. I encourage you to contact them for clarification.

However, it is my opinion that you would only need 1 vCenter license for both sites. With that, assuming you have a decent WAN connection between them, you should be able to use VMHA, only between the servers at each site, but still manage it with a single license server and vCenter server.

The vCenter server just needs full DNS connectivity to all servers and the iSCSI servers. Of course, if one site was lost, you would have to very quickly bring up a licensing server and vCenter server at the other site. You would also have to be careful if you are using Windows AD and you have different domains or OUs at each site when it comes to planning who will be able to manage the virtual infrastructure and with what credentials. Of course, there is no VMHA or ISO image mounting, etc, across the WAN. Whoever is doing the administration would have to understand those limitations of this management configuration.

You would also have to take into account things like backup & restore....

Hope that helps!

David