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This chapter introduces vCenter Server Heartbeat and provides an overview of the vCenter Server Heartbeat
concepts. It contains the following sections:
 “vCenter Server Heartbeat Protection” on page 7
 “Communications” on page 9
vCenter Server Heartbeat Protection
vCenter Server Heartbeat is a Windows based service specifically designed to provide high availability
protection for vCenter Server configurations without requiring any specialized hardware.
Server Protection
Two instances of vCenter Server Heartbeat regularly send “I’m alive” messages and message
acknowledgments to one another over a network connection referred to as the VMware Channel to detect
interruptions in responsiveness. If the passive server detects that this monitoring process (referred to as the
heartbeat) has failed, it initiates a failover as illustrated in Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1. Failover
vCenter Server Heartbeat
Introduction
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