For a better performing vSphere infrastructure, you need to think about the redundancy of your vCenter server. So, the question is how would you provide redundancy for your vCenter server?
Well, this decision can be taken based on certain criteria:
- How much downtime can you tolerate?
- What is your desired level of failover automation for vCenter server?
- What is your budget for maintaining the availability method?
There are a couple of redundancy methods that are available for both your Windows-based vCenter server. You can use VMware HA or FT to protect a Windows vCenter VM. If you choose a physical Windows-based vCenter server, then you can use third-party clustering software, such as Microsoft Cluster Service, to provide redundancy.
You can also choose a manual configuration and manual failover for your vCenter server system. However, it can take much longer than your automated solution using vSphere HA, vCenter Server Heartbeat, or any other third-party clustering software. Not only does it take time to set up the initial configuration of your vCenter server, but also to synchronize these two systems and ensure there would be failover at the time of service disruption.