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Seems that VMware is cleaning its products portfolio. After the End of Availability of VSA, now VMware is announcing the End of Availability (EoA) of all VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat versions effective June 2, 2014. As a result, all versions of vCenter Server Heartbeat will be removed from the VMware price list on June 2, 2014. After this date, you will no longer be able to purchase these products.

All support and maintenance for the removed versions will be unaffected and will continue on per VMware Life Cycle policy through the published support period until September 19, 2018.

This will have significant impact on the design option for a High Availability vCenter configuration. As written in a previous post, there are few options to increase the availability of vCenter Server:

  • use a VM for vCenter Server and use VMware HA
  • use vCenter Server Heartbeat product
  • use a MSCS solution for vCenter (unsupported)
  • other third-party clustering solutions (unsupported)
  • use VMware FT (can work, but it’s unsupported)

Now, at least for new deployments, VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is no more a possible option. The specified reason is that VMware has chosen to readdress availability options to protect vCenter Server from outages based on internal availability solution offerings.

The more realistic reason is that in this way will be possible push more the Virtual Appliance version of vCenter (the lack of vCenter Server Heartbeat compatibility was one of the limit).

The FAQ explain also that VMware has no immediate plans to introduce another product that will take the place of vCenter Server Heartbeat, and that customers can leverage vSphere High Availability, and leverage best practices to deploy vCenter Server in a management cluster to ensure availability of managed resources.

Will be another reason to deploy VM based vCenter Center, although physical deployment seems that will be still supported, but in those case you have to found better solution to provide high availability.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.