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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

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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

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Impact of Downtime - External vCenter Applications

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Chargeback

Site Recovery Manager

1

Lab Manager

2

VIEW Server / Composer

3

CapacityIQ

4

AppSpeed

5

vCloud Director

6vCenter Server

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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

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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

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How Do You Protect vCenter Server Today?

• No protection

• Keep a backup copy archived

• Cold standby server

• Clustering

• VMware HA

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Protecting vCenter Server

vCenter

Services

vCenter Inventory

Standard DR Solution

vCenter Server

(Primary)

Replication ofstate files

vCenter Server

(Standby)

Database ServerDatabase Server

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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)

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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

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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

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Complete Protection for vCenter Server

Hardware

Failures

Network

Failures

OS

Failures

Application

Failures

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QuickTime™ and a decompressor

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vCenter Server

vCenter Server Heartbeat

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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

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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

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vCenter Server Heartbeat: Improved User Interface

Simplified hierarchy view of all protected

services

Status information on Primary Server

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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

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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

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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