6.5

The NICs that support connectivity across the VMware Channel can be standard 100BaseT Ethernet cards
providing a throughput of 100 Mbits per second across standard Cat-5 cabling. In its most basic form, a dedicated
channel requires no hubs or routers, but the direct connection requires crossover cabling.
WAN Deployment
When congured for a WAN deployment, congure the VMware Channel to use static routes over switches
and routers to maintain continuous communications independent from corporate or public trac.
vCenter Server Heartbeat Switchover and Failover Processes
vCenter Server Heartbeat uses four dierent procedures — managed switchover, automatic switchover,
automatic failover, and managed failover — to change the role of the active and passive servers depending on
the status of the active server.
Managed Switchover
You can click Make Active on the vCenter Server Heartbeat Console Server: Summary page to manually initiate
a managed switchover. When a managed switchover is triggered, the running of protected applications is
transferred from the active machine to the passive machine in the server pair. The server roles are reversed.
Figure 1- 6. Switchover
A managed switchover performs the following steps:
1 Stop the protected applications on the active server. After the protected applications stop, no more disk
updates are generated.
2 Send all updates that are still queued on the active server to the passive server. After this step, all updates
are available on the passive server.
3 Re-designate the Secondary server as the new active server. After this step, vCenter Server Heartbeat:
■
Reassigns the Principal (Public) IP address to the Secondary server.
■
Makes the newly active server visible on the network. The newly active server begins to intercept
and queue disk I/O operations for the newly passive server.
VMware, Inc. 15
Chapter 1 Introduction