Overview: vCenter Server Heartbeat

1. Overview: vCenter Server Heartbeat Q3 2010

2. Agenda • Why is vCenter Server Availability Important? • What Needs to Be Protected? • Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat

3. vCenter Server: A Key Infrastructure Component A universal hub for virtualization management

4. How Do You Use vCenter Server? • Monitor cluster, host and VM performance • Manage VM and host provisioning • Patch and update hosts and VMs • Configure and operate VMotion, DRS, HA and FT • Provision and manage a VMware VIEW environment • Manage disaster recover plans • Test / develop VMs and applications • Allow access for third party applications

5. 1 Site Recovery Manager 2 7 Chargeback Lab Manager vCenter Server 6 3 VIEW Server / Composer vCloud Director 5 4 CapacityIQ AppSpeed Impact of Downtime - External vCenter Applications

6. Impact of vCenter Server Downtime

7. Agenda • Why is vCenter Server Availability Important? • What Needs to Be Protected? • Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat

8. Determining a Strategy • Define the Scope of Protection Desired • Which is most important? • Local high availability for hardware/network failures? • Protecting application integrity and uptime against all types of threats? • Remote disaster recovery for large scale, site-wide outages? • Is uptime during maintenance windows needed? • What is the recovery time objective? • Need to base this on what functionality is unavailable during vCenter Server outage

9. How Do You Protect vCenter Server Today? • No protection • Keep a backup copy archived • Cold standby server • Clustering • VMware HA

10. Protecting vCenter Server Replication ofstate files vCenter Services vCenter Server (Primary) vCenter Server (Standby) vCenter Inventory Standard DR Solution Database Server Database Server

11. What is required to restore vCenter functionality? • vCenter Server is an almost stateless application • Data stored in the vCenter database is the most critical resource • Following data is necessary to restore the vCenter functionality (with intact database) • vCenter server IP Address • DNS name for ODBC connection • License files for the License Manager Server • Security Certificates • vCenter Configuration file • vCenter Plug-in data • Customized data from upgrade directory (if applicable)

12. Agenda • Why is vCenter Server Availability Important? • What Needs to Be Protected? • Protecting vCenter with vCenter Server Heartbeat

13. Solutions for Protecting vCenter Server • vCenter downtime greatly impacts productivity of VI Administrators • However, several options can be used to mitigate the potential for vCenter Server downtime • The solution of choice will depend on level of protection desired and recovery point objectives.

14. Overview: VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat • Extends availability for the vCenter Server platform • Add-on to vCenter Server protects critical components of the infrastructure • Deep awareness of all vCenter Server components • Simple configuration and deployment • Replicates all data and transactions to a standby server • Failover of the application and database over the LAN or WAN • Best-of breed-technology • VMware has selected Neverfail to provide the underlying technology • Proven technology supports SQL, Exchange, Blackberry availability • vCenter Server Heartbeat is a VMware product and fully supported by VMware

15. Complete Protection for vCenter Server Hardware Failures OS Failures vCenter Server Application Failures Network Failures vCenter Server Heartbeat

16. vCenter Server Heartbeat Architecture • Purely software-based solution with no dependencies • Paired Servers with Shared Nothing Architecture • Active/Passive clone • Hardware Agnostic • Physical & Virtual Support • Application Awareness (AMF) • Hardware and Software Redundancy

17. What’s New in vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 • Unified management of multiple nodes • Manage availability for groups of vCenter Servers from a single UI • Distributed vCenter Servers and SQL databases can be managed as pairs • Simplified UI • Tree structure shows overall health and availability status of all servers • Easier-to-use interface for managing thresholds and alerts in Heartbeat • Extends Heartbeat protection to View Composer • Support for vCenter Server 4.1 and 4.0 Update 2 • Improved platform support – native x64, Windows Server 2008 R2

18. vCenter Server Heartbeat: Improved User Interface Simplified hierarchy view of all protected services Status information on Primary Server

19. Comparing vCenter Server Heartbeat Deeper more granular protection than other solutions

20. vCenter Server Heartbeat: Defense in Depth Complete vCenter Heartbeat Replication Depth of HA protection Clustering VMware HA Hardware/OS Specific All Breadth of workloads supported

21. Summary: Why vCenter Server Heartbeat? • High availability for VC is growing in importance for customers running VMware in production • Underlying infrastructure needs to be fully protected, especially for VDI and cloud environments • HA provides robust general-purpose protection of virtualized workloads • Need to protect against configuration errors, network failures, OS failures, database failures with WAN failover support • Many customers run vCenter Server on a physical server • Other solutions are expensive, complex and lack app awareness, support for database, WAN failover • Customers have been asking for a VMware solution that provides more granular availability for vCenter Server