With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware also updated a number of related products. One of them is vCenter Server Heartbeat.
In March 2009 VMware decided to address a serious concern related to its virtual infrastructure: the lack of native fault tolerance for vCenter Server.
To do so, the company closed an OEM deal with NeverFail, rebranding its partner’s product in vCenter Server Heartbeat 1.0 and selling it against 3rd party solutions like the ones offered by CA, Double-Take or Steel Eye.
Somewhere during the last 16 months VMware decided to align the version number of its OEMed product with the one of NeverFail: so today we have Heartbeat 6.3 (build 4316).
The update introduces a number of new features:
- Distributed vCenter and SQL servers can now be grouped as a pair of servers providing the single business application
- vCenter Servers can be grouped providing management of vSphere infrastructure by Organizational Unit
- The UI shows rolled up status of the health of the applications and servers within a group as well as a
- User customizations now can be disabled for diagnostic and support purposes.
- Native 64bit architecture
- Support for vSphere 4.0 Update 2 and 4.1
- Support for Windows Server 2008 R2
- Support for View Composer 1.1 and 2.0