How much breaks when vCenter Server is not running?

Shad · 11 Apr 2013 at 08:27

My home lab will soon be using shared storage and 2 identical hosts. I have vCenter Server running on Server 2012 in a VM, but I'm concerned about how much will stop working if a host fails while it's running the vCenter VM. Does HA still kick in during a failure? Will DRS still work?

I would consider running it fault tolerant but then I can't take snapshots (or use enough vCPUs).

Shad · 11 Apr 2013 at 09:26

That's a shame, especially about HA. I thought the agents might work it out themselves in the absence of vCenter.

Is there a good way to have a fault-tolerant vCenter VM that can still have snapshots? I guess I could script something... bit of a faff though.

Shad · 11 Apr 2013 at 10:27

That's music to my ears, thanks guys

Shad · 11 Apr 2013 at 15:33

Thanks rotor, great explanation. I've held off using dvSwitches because I assumed they would die if vCenter was down, but haven't had time to test/read up on it. More good news

Shad · 24 Apr 2013 at 22:03

This idea of system/private VLANs has just fried my brain. Any chance you could walk us through a real-world example?

For now I think I'll stick to putting the vCenter traffic on the management vSwitch.

Shad · 25 Apr 2013 at 08:20

Goliath said:
As for things breaking when vCenter isn't running, don't forget backups and restores if you're using something like VEEM. Becomes a bit of an issue when your SAN craps out, corrupts your vCenter VM and you need to restore it

This is something I've just been trying to plan for. VEEM is running on my vCenter server so as you say, that won't work when it and/or the SAN are down. But I've got my backups going to a simple physical disk (RDM) that I can pull out and restore from. Although without having VEEM running that's going to be tricky... bugger :rolleyes:

Best workaround for that particular situation?

Shad · 25 Apr 2013 at 17:33

DRZ said:
Veeam doesn't use a catalogue in the same way as, say, Backup Exec does. You can quickly install Veeam on a machine that isn't down, double-click on the .vbk and restore the VM from there.

I'm amazed people are running Veeam actually on the vCenter server though.

Ok that's good to know. Hopefully I'll never need to test that out but still, it's good to know it's doable.

For me I'm only working on a home lab so kit etc is limited.

rotor said:
PVLANs are something completely different from the Nexus 1000v "system VLANs". PVLANs appear to be for securing multi-tenant environments.

Ah my mistake, thanks for clarifying