Native vCenter High Availability – I wanted to explore this feature since vSphere 6.5 was announced in VMworld Europe this year. With VMware announcing general availability of vSPhere 6.5 I was able to setup test environment in my lab and I am very exited about implementing the same in production at later point. Traditionally there was no out of the box solution available for vCenter high availability but there were other solutions to provide high availability to vCenter services such as vSphere HA, vSphere Fault Tolerence, Microsoft Clustering and now retired vCenter Server Heartbeat. With the new release VMware provides Native High Availability for vCenter Servers, as of now this feature is available only for vCSA based deployments. The new VCHA architecture is made of three node cluster. Active, Passive and a Witness node. Passive is full clone of the original Active node, witness node is clone of the original Active node. Witness node will never become Active in event of failure. Prerequisites to setup VCHA is fully functional DRS/HA cluster with minimum of 2-3 nodes. Continuous file level replication takes place between active and passive nodes using Linux RSYNC which keeps all the configurations and services state in sync. Native Native vPostgres DB replication will handle replication of VCDB and VUMDB. Continue reading →