6.5.1
Table Of Contents
- vSphere Availability
- Contents
- About vSphere Availability
- Business Continuity and Minimizing Downtime
- Creating and Using vSphere HA Clusters
- Providing Fault Tolerance for Virtual Machines
- vCenter High Availability
- Plan the vCenter HA Deployment
- Configure the Network
- Configure vCenter HA With the Basic Option
- Configure vCenter HA With the Advanced Option
- Manage the vCenter HA Configuration
- Set Up SNMP Traps
- Set Up Your Environment to Use Custom Certificates
- Manage vCenter HA SSH Keys
- Initiate a vCenter HA Failover
- Edit the vCenter HA Cluster Configuration
- Perform Backup and Restore Operations
- Remove a vCenter HA Configuration
- Reboot All vCenter HA Nodes
- Change the Appliance Environment
- Collecting Support Bundles for a vCenter HA Node
- Troubleshoot Your vCenter HA Environment
- Patching a vCenter High Availability Environment
- Using Microsoft Clustering Service for vCenter Server on Windows High Availability
- Index
Using Microsoft Clustering Service
for vCenter Server on Windows High
Availability 5
When you deploy vCenter Server, you must build a highly available architecture that can handle workloads
of all sizes.
Availability is critical for solutions that require continuous connectivity to vCenter Server. To avoid
extended periods of downtime, you can achieve continuous connectivity for vCenter Server by using a
Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) cluster.
This chapter includes the following topics:
n
“Benets and Limitations of Using MSCS,” on page 79
n
“Upgrade vCenter Server in an MSCS Environment,” on page 79
n
“Congure MSCS for High Availability,” on page 81
Benefits and Limitations of Using MSCS
vCenter Server 5.5 update 3.x supports Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) as an option for providing
vCenter Server availability.
Multiple instances of vCenter Server are in an MSCS cluster, but only one instance is active at a time. Use
this solution to perform maintenance, such as operating system patching or upgrades, excluding
vCenter Server patching or upgrades, You perform maintenance on one node in the cluster without shuing
down the vCenter Server database.
Another potential benet of this approach is that MSCS uses a type of "shared-nothing" cluster architecture.
The cluster does not involve concurrent disk accesses from multiple nodes. In other words, the cluster does
not require a distributed lock manager. MSCS clusters typically include only two nodes and they use a
shared SCSI connection between the nodes. Only one server needs the disks at any given time. No
concurrent data access occurs. This sharing minimizes the impact if a node fails.
Unlike the vSphere HA cluster option, the MSCS option works only for Windows virtual machines. The
MSCS option does not support vCenter Server Appliance.
N This conguration is supported only when vCenter Server is running as a VM, not on a physical
host.
Upgrade vCenter Server in an MSCS Environment
If you are running vCenter Server 6.0, you must upgrade to vCenter Server 6.5 to set up an MSCS high
availability environment.
vCenter Server 6.0.x has 18 services, assuming that the PSC server is running on a dierent host.
vCenter Server 6.5 has 3 services and the names have changed. An MSCS cluster conguration created to set
up high availability for vCenter Server 6.0 becomes invalid after an upgrade to vCenter Server 6.5.
VMware, Inc.
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