vCenter Basic Doubt!

[esantoshexel]

Hello,

Please, could someone help me with these basic questions?

I have two physical virtualization servers and one storage directed attached. Both servers runs ESXi with vCenter Essential Plus license (supporting HA and Fault Tolerance).

I have one virtual machine in Fault Tolerance scope (with 4 vCPUs = 4 vCPUs for shadow and 4 vCPUs for active VM).

I have one virtual machine running only in physical server 1 and I have other one virtual machine running only in physical server 2

Now I also need the virtual machine for vCenter that manages the cluster. And the doubts are:

Does the vCenter virtual machine needs to be run under HA?

Is the vCenter virtual machine used just to configure (and diagnose) the servers and all these configurations are stored on the ESXi servers? I have the doubt because if I lost the physical server 1 and the vCenter virtual machine goes down (because it was running on this server 1), then I lost my architecture, cluster management and etc. Is it?

Thank you so much! And kindly sorry for these basic doubts.

Eduardo

[Scott Vessey]

You can probably survive without vCenter Server for a few minutes, so setup vSphere HA and let it failover your vCenter Server VM in the event that the host should fail.

You may need it back online for your backup software to function (assuming it’s doing a VM-level backup), plus for other routine vSphere administration and monitoring.

[esantoshexel]

Thank you so much, scott28tt​ !!!

[IRIX201110141]

Aeh....  vSphere Essentials Plus contains HA and vMotion but no FT or was there a recent change? Do you run in the 60day Eval period?

The vCenter is needed for enable and setup HA and also FT but both features can work without a vCenter. If vCenter is effected by a outage than HA and FT runs independently and for sure vCenter is procteted by HA and as long as ressources are there, and HA configure in the right way the vCenter VM will be restarted on a remaining Host.

Regards
Joerg

[esantoshexel]

Hi Joerg IRIX201110141​

Thanks for reply.

Then is not the vCenter responsible to keep the virtualization structure working ? With vCenter, we can basically setup all our architecture, define pools and diagnose the system and are these configurations immediately saved on each host (physical ESXi)? Then we don't need the vCenter running after the structure setup (okay it's a good practise to keep vCenter VM in HA but it's not critical to have this VM running, right)?

Then if I have a problem on this vCenter VM that can't start (windows crash, VM crash...), our architecture remain working fine (with FT, HA and etc)?

Sorry for mistake... the license will be Enterprise Plus

Best regards,

Eduardo

[IRIX201110141]

For certain aspects the vCenter isnt involved. VMware have designed HA and FT in that way that vCenter isnt the SPOF.

For sure you need vCenter for all the other things (like DRS,DPM,vDS for example)... but you have to wait until it is back when its unavailable.

Regards,
Joerg