vCenter Server HA Performance And Best Practices 6.5
VMware vSphere® is a virtualization platform that forms the foundation for building and managing an
organization's virtual, public, and private cloud infrastructures. VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™ (vCSA) sits
at the heart of vSphere and provides services to manage various components of a virtual infrastructure like ESXi
hosts, virtual machines, and storage and networking resources. As large virtual infrastructures are built using
vSphere, vCenter Server becomes an important element in ensuring the business continuity of an organization.
vCenter Server must protect itself from a set of hardware and software failures in an environment and must
recover transparently from such failures. vSphere 6.5 provides a high availability solution for vCenter Server,
known as vCenter Server High Availability, or VCHA.
This paper shows:
• VCHA performance characterization: A preliminary performance evaluation of the VCHA feature.
• VCHA best practices: Some guidelines for VCHA deployment and configuration.
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vCenter HA cluster spanning multiple datacenters, our design does not assume a shared storage–based
deployment. As a result, one node in the vCenter HA cluster is permanently designated as a quorum node, or a
Witness node. The other two nodes in the cluster dynamically assume the roles of Active and Passive nodes.
vCenter Server availability is assured as long as there are two nodes running inside a cluster. However, a cluster
is considered to be running in a degraded state if there are only two nodes in it. A subsequent failure in a
degraded cluster means vCenter services are no longer available.
A vCenter Server appliance is stateful and requires a strong, consistent state for it to work correctly. The
appliance state (configuration state or runtime state) is mainly composed of:
• Database data (stored in the embedded PostgreSQL database)
• Flat files (for example, configuration files).
The appliance state must be backed up in order for VCHA failover to work properly. For the state to be stored
inside the PostgreSQL database, we use the PostgreSQL native replication mechanism to keep the database
data of the primary and secondary in sync. For flat files, a Linux native solution, rsync, is used for replication.
Because the vCenter Server appliance requires strong consistency, it is a strong requirement to utilize a
synchronous form of replication to replicate the appliance state from the Active node to the Passive node.