VMworld VIDEO: VirtualCenter Heartbeat Service
Date: Feb 25, 2009This session was about VC Heartbeat Service. It’s not free (its actually quite expensive!) and I believe its a licensed version of NeverFail for VirtualCenter. It looks like you cannot VMware FT vCenter (don’t quote me on that – this still bleeding edge stuff which hardly anyone has tried!) which would be the natural thing to do.
Basically, VMware created a single-point of failure for MANAGEMENT (I know VC is not single point of failure for VMs)… upon which ALL the high-level management layers (SRM, LCM, LM, View, etc) depend – so not only do I have to pay for vCenter, I pay again if it fails… Yikes!
I’ve got customers who have had VC up for 18 months without a problem (they clearly do no upgrades then, Mike?) so you have got to wonder whether its worth the spend…