High availability (aka HA) services are important in any platform, and VMware vCenter Server® is no exception. As the main administrative and management tool of vSphere, it is a critical element that requires HA. vCenter Server HA (aka VCHA) delivers protection against software and hardware failures with excellent performance for common customer scenarios, as shown in this paper.

Much work has gone into the high availability feature of VMware vCenter Server® 6.5 to ensure that this service and its operations minimally affect the performance of your vCenter Server and vSphere hosts. We thoroughly tested VCHA with a benchmark that simulates common vCenter Server activities in both regular and worst case scenarios. The result is solid data and a comprehensive performance characterization in terms of:

• Performance of VCHA failover/recovery time objective (RTO): In case of a failure, vCenter Server HA (VCHA) provides failover/RTO such that users can continue with their work in less than 2 minutes through API clients and less than 4 minutes through UI clients. While failover/RTO depends on the vCenter Server configuration and the inventory size, in our tests it is within the target limit, which is 5 minutes.
• Performance of enabling VCHA: We observed that enabling VCHA would take around 4 – 9 minutes depending on the vCenter Server configuration and the inventory size.
• VCHA overhead: When VCHA is enabled, there is no significant impact for vCenter Server under typical load conditions. We observed a noticeable but small impact of VCHA when the vCenter Server was under extreme load; however, it is unlikely for customers to generate that much load on the vCenter Server for extended time periods.
• Performance impact of vCenter Server statistics level: With an increasing statistics level, vCenter Server produces less throughput, as expected. When VCHA is enabled for various statistics levels, we observe a noticeable but small impact of 3% to 9% on throughput.
• Performance impact of a private network: VCHA is designed to support LAN networks with up to 10 ms latency between VCHA nodes. However, this comes with a performance penalty. We study the performance impact of the private network in detail and provide further guidelines about how to configure VCHA for the best performance.
• External Platform Services Controller (PSC) vs Embedded PSC: We study VCHA performance comparing these two deployment modes and observe a minimal difference between them.

Throughout the paper, our findings show that vCenter Server HA performs well under a variety of circumstances. In addition to the performance study results, the paper describes the VCHA architecture and includes some useful performance best practices for getting the most from VCHA.

For the full paper, see VMware vCenter Server High Availability Performance and Best Practices.