High Availability for Virtual Infrastructure: vCenter Server Heartbeat

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.

Users are not required to take any immediate action. This notification in no ways impacts customer’s ability to use VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat past June 2, 2014. Customers receive perpetual licenses when purchasing VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat and this entitles them to continued use of the licenses despite the end of availability or end of support.

For any further inquiries, please contact VMware Support

FAQS

vCenter Server Heartbeat End of Availability FAQs

What is VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat?

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is a software product that protects vCenter Server against outages–from application, operating system, hardware and network failures to external events–regardless of whether vCenter Server is deployed on a physical or virtual machine.

Why is vCenter Server Heartbeat availability ending?

VMware has chosen to readdress availability options to protect vCenter Server from outages based on internal availability solution offerings.

When is vCenter Server Heartbeat EoA effective?

vCenter Server Heartbeat will be made EoA June 2, 2014.

When is the end of support for vCenter Server Heartbeat?

End of support is planned for September 19, 2018.

Is VMware introducing another product that will take the place of vCenter Server Heartbeat?

There are no immediate plans to introduce another product.

What are the alternatives to vCenter Server Heartbeat?

Customers can leverage vSphere High Availability, and leverage best practices to deploy vCenter Server in a management cluster to ensure availability of managed resources.

How do customers maintain high availability for vCenter Server deployed on a physical server?

VMware best practice recommends deployment of vCenter Server as a virtual machine and to use vSphere High Availability to provide high availability functionality. However, customers can still retain high availability and backup of their physically deployed vCenter Server and associated databases through the use of physical backup software/systems provided by several storage backup vendors.