By Jeremy Carter, VMware Senior Consultant
When I’m working on a customer engagement, we always strategize to ensure resiliency and failover protection for vCenter Automation Center (vCAC). While these considerations continue to be top priorities, there is another question that seems to be coming up more and more: “What about vCenter?”
vCenter has long been thought of as the constant, the unshakable foundation that supports business differentiators like vCAC. Although we’re happy for that reputation, it’s important for IT organizations to take the appropriate actions to protect all components up and down the stack
This is increasingly necessary as organizations move into an IT-as-a-Service model. As more parts of the business come to rely on the services that IT provides, IT must be sure to deliver on its SLAs—and that means improved resilience for vCenter as well as the applications that sit on top of it.
Our customers have found vCenter Server Heartbeat to be an essential tool to support this effort. Heartbeat allows IT to monitor and protect vCenter from a centralized easy-to-use web interface and protects against application or operator errors, operating system or hardware failure and external. In addition to protecting against the unplanned downtime, it provides improved control during planned downtime, such as during Windows updates, allowing patches without vCenter downtime.
In the past, Heartbeat was most popular with service providers who needed to securely open up vCenter to customers. Now that more IT organizations are becoming service providers themselves, I encourage them to support their internal customers at the same level and make sure vCenter resilience and protection is part of the plan.
Jeremy Carter is a VMware Senior Consultant with special expertise in BCDR and cloud automation. Although he joined VMware just three months ago, he has worked in the IT industry for more than 14 years.
