I’ve been
receiving the same question over and over from my clients....
“ Can I use the
same Heartbeat license to protect all vCenter components? “
Short answer: YES !!!!
No matter if they
are all installed on the same box or if they are running elsewhere. A single
vCenter Heartbeat License can protect all components of your vCenter
environment.
REMINDER: if you have more than one vCenter environment you
will need additional vCenter Heartbeat licenses.
Let’s extrapolate
it at maximum:
The screen
bellow, is a perfect supported environment where all the servers are protected
with the same vCenter Heartbeat license.
There’s one
caveat here:
Database
Servers!!! (Heartbeat just protects it when running on SQL servers).
If your database
server hosts other databases than vCenter related databases, you would need to
create a SQL instance just for vCenter related databases and then protect this
instance with vCenter Heartbeat. Of course, the others databases/instances
would not be protect and in case of failure or switch over they will
unavailable.
So, How do I know
all of this ?
During some
internal VMware training it has been explored a lot, I also get it confirmed by
vCenter Heartbeat’s Product Manager.
But, I was not
convinced that I could not prove that to my clients, driving me to check if this
information is publicly available.
I started with
vCenter Heartbeat End User License Agreement (EULA).
Don’t even bother
to look at it. There’s nothing related to what we are looking for.
Next step was to
check released notes, starting with the last version, 6.5. Nothing in there
either.
Since I was there
I took a look at the release notes of all others versions.
“ vCenter Server Heartbeat — The
SQL Server Plug-in provides protection for the SQL Server database if it is
present on the same server or if deployed separately.”
Well, it’s more
related with the ability to protect remotely SQL databases than a license
compliant issue, right ?!?!?
No luck with the
Administration Guide.
But, On the
Installation Guide, the implementation section states:
”vCenter Server
Heartbeat can protect vCenter Server and SQL Server installed on the same
server, or protect vCenter Server in a
distributed configuration.
Seems we
confirmed that we can use it to protect the components on a distributed
configuration.
“vCenter Server Heartbeat Plug-in provides protection for
all associated VMware vCenter Server and VMware License Server configuration
data, services, application data files, and log files.”
To me it’s enough information to prove how a vCenter
Heartbeat license can be used. How about you ?
