There is little bene t to using vCenter HA without also providing high availability at the Platform Services Controller layer. When using vCenter HA with an external Platform Services Controller deployment, an external load balancer is required to provide high availability to the Platform Services Controller instances. In other words, an external Platform Services Controller instance is required when there are multiple vCenter Server instances in an Enhanced Linked Mode configuration. An embedded Platform Services Controller instance can be used when there are no other vCenter Server or Platform Services Controller instances within the single sign-on domain. There is also a maintenance mode that prevents planned maintenance from causing an unwanted failover.įrom an architecture perspective, vCenter HA supports both embedded and external Platform Services Controllers. vCenter HA can also be enabled, disabled, or destroyed at any time allowing customers to easily take advantage of this new capability. vCenter HA is included with the vCenter Server Standard license which means that no additional licensing is required. vCenter HA provides an RTO of about 5 minutes for vCenter Server greatly reducing the impact of host, hardware, and application failures with automatic failover between the Active and Passive nodes. When vCenter HA is enabled, a three-node vCenter Server cluster (Active, Passive, and Witness nodes) is deployed. If you aren’t familiar with vCenter High Availability, it is a new feature introduced in vSphere 6.5 and exclusively available for the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).
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I am excited to announce two new walkthroughs for vCenter High availability on the VMware Feature Walkthroughs site! These two new click-by-click product walkthroughs will show you how to enable vCenter High Availability (also known as vCenter HA) and give you the confidence you need to use this exciting new feature in your own environment! vCenter High Availability Overview