Transcript Presentation Title

Overview: vCenter Server Heartbeat
Q3 2010
Confidential
© 2009 VMware Inc. All rights reserved
Agenda
 Why is vCenter Server Availability Important?
 What Needs to Be Protected?
 Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat
2
vCenter Server: A Key Infrastructure Component
A universal hub for virtualization management
3
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
4
Impact of Downtime - External vCenter Applications
1
Site Recovery
Manager
7
2
Chargeback
Lab Manager
vCenter Server
6
vCloud Director
5
3
VIEW Server /
Composer
5
4
AppSpeed
CapacityIQ
Impact of vCenter Server Downtime
Component
6
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
Agenda
 Why is vCenter Server Availability Important?
 What Needs to Be Protected?
 Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat
7
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
8
How Do You Protect vCenter Server Today?
• No protection
• Keep a backup copy archived
• Cold standby server
• Clustering
• VMware HA
9
Protecting vCenter Server
Replication of
state files
vCenter
Services
vCenter
Inventory
vCenter Server
vCenter Server
(Primary)
(Standby)
Standard DR Solution
Database Server
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Database Server
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
12
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.
13
VMware Solutions
Third-Party Solutions
VMware HA
Backup
VMware vCenter Server
Heartbeat
Clustering
Host Replication
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
OS
Failures
Failures
vCenter Server
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Network
Application
Failures
Failures
vCenter Server Heartbeat
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vCenter Server Heartbeat Architecture
 Purely software-based
solution with no dependencies
 Paired Servers with Shared
Nothing Architecture
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



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Active/Passive clone
Hardware Agnostic
Physical & Virtual Support
Application Awareness (AMF)
Hardware and Software
Redundancy
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
Deeper more granular protection than other solutions
Host
Replication
Heartbeat
Hardware & OS failures
Yes
Yes
Configuration Agnostic
Yes
Yes
Partial
Yes
Medium-High
Low
Protects vCenter Server
components
No
Yes
Network failures
No
Yes
WAN failover
Complexity
19
vCenter Server Heartbeat: Defense in Depth
Complete
vCenter
Heartbeat
Depth of
HA
protection
Replication
Clustering
VMware
HA
Hardware
/OS
Specific
20
Breadth of workloads
supported
All
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
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