Vcenter Heartbeat Managed IP & Physical to Virtual Networking

[billymonroe]

Ok, I have a couple of stupid questions.  BTW, I'm running 5.1 Update 2 and installing Heartbeat 6.6.  LAN replication.

Question #1: I am going to install heartbeat but I'm noticing that it requires a Vcenter Managment IP. Does this IP need to be the current IP of the VCenter Server i'm about to clone?

Question #2: My primary virtual center is a physical server and I'm going to clone to a virtual.  I've read through the documentation a couple times but I'm having trouble understanding the renaming of interfaces on the physical and virtual.  We are using DS switches, not standard on our VMs.  Do I need to create a new DS switch for a new UPLink port or do I just need to use the existing add two NICs to the VC VM that I cloned with the new network configurations.  Sorry if this question is confusing but it seems that going from Physical to Virtual configuration is not as straight forward as a virtual to virtual.

Thanks,

Billy

[rh5592]

Hi,

Question #1: You basically need 3 IP addresses, 1 Public IP which will be the virtual IP for the 2 nodes and 2 Management IP for the 2 nodes.

Ex: vc.yourdomain.com - 192.168.1.100

       vc1.yourdomain.com - 192.168.1.101

       vc02.yourdomain.com - 192.168.1.102

When installing heartbeat, make sure your hostname and IP address is configured as the virtual name and IP first. In the example above, your first vCenter Server should be named vc.yourdomain.com. During heartbeat installation it will prompt you to change the hostname and IP address of the 2 nodes. I've blog about this here http://virtxpress.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/vcenter-heartbeat-gotchas/

Question #2: It is recommended to have separate switches with separate uplinks for multi nic config so as to completely isolate the channel network from the management network and provide resilience/redundancy. It is not a hard requirement though. You can also use VLANs to separate the management and channel network using the same distributed switch on different port groups. On the VC VM, you will have 2 NICs where 1 is the management and the other is for the channel network. Of course the Physical VC should have the same and can communicate with the secondary on those two networks.

[billymonroe]

Ok, so i'm just trying to draw up some ideas.  Is it like this?

[rh5592]

Pretty much it but be careful on the following. On your physical server (which is VC1),  is vCenter Server already installed? If yes then the existing FQDN of your vCenter Server will become the Public Name. You have to add another IP address for the Public IP which is another IP on your management VLAN. During Heartbeat installation, you will be asked to change the hostname of VC1 (your physical server to ex VC1-A) and your virtual secondary (VC1-B). You will also be asked to ensure that DNS is configured to resolve the Public name and the new management names.

In summary you will have:

- 2 Ip addresses in Adapter 1 MGMT VLAN (1 for Public  and one for Management)

- 1 Ip address in Adapter 2 Channel VLAN (for channel)

THe Public FQDN/IP address will be used to connect to the active vCenter Server, not through its management IP.

[billymonroe]

Ok, this makes perfect sense.. Thanks for your repsonse.  I'm assuming that the same follows once i create the heartbeat for the database server?  I haven't got to that documentation yet.

[rh5592]

If you are going to protect your SQL server database with Heartbeat, then yes same thing. Check this VMware site for some cool tutorials on Heartbeat

VMware
http://featurewalkthrough.vmware.com/vCenterHeartBeat-6-6/