High Availability Design for vCenter Server for the Management Domain
Protecting the management domain vCenter Server is important because it is the central point of management and monitoring for the management domain.
VMware Cloud Foundation supports only vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) as a high availability method for the management domain vCenter Server.
High Availability Method | Protects vCenter Server Appliance | Supported in VMware Cloud Foundation |
|---|---|---|
Automated protection by using vSphere HA | Yes | Yes |
Manual configuration and manual failover, for example, by using a cold standby clone. | Yes | No |
vCenter Server High Availability | Yes | No |
vSphere FT | Yes | No |
Decision ID | Design Decision | Design Justification | Design Implication |
|---|---|---|---|
VCF-MGMT-VCS-CFG-006 | Protect the appliance of the management domain vCenter Server by using vSphere HA. | vSphere HA is the only supported method to protect vCenter Server availability in VMware Cloud Foundation. | vCenter Server becomes unavailable during a vSphere HA failover. |
VCF-MGMT-VCS-CFG-007 | In vSphere HA, set the restart priority policy for the vCenter Server appliance to high. | vCenter Server is the management and control plane for physical and virtual infrastructure. In a vSphere HA event, to ensure the rest of the SDDC management stack comes up faultlessly, the management domain vCenter Server must be available first, before the other management components come online. | If the restart priority for another virtual machine is set to highest, the connectivity delay for the management components will be longer. |
Decision ID | Design Decision | Design Justification | Design Implication |
|---|---|---|---|
VCF-MGMT-VCS-CFG-008 | Add the vCenter Server appliance to the virtual machine group for the first availability zone. See Table 3. | Ensures that, by default, the vCenter Server appliance is powered on a host in the first availability zone. | None. |