VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat delivers high availability for the VMware vCenter Server management platform, ensuring consistent operation of VMware vSphere 4 when VMware vCenter Server is threatened by unplanned or planned downtime.

With more and more enterprises deploying mission-critical workloads on VMware vSphere, protecting its underlying management platform is quickly becoming a critical requirement. Maintaining high availability for VMware vCenter Server gives customers continuous access to important functions and critical information about their environment. Increasingly, enterprises need a comprehensive, easy-to-implement and easy-to-use mechanism for monitoring, replicating and protecting VMware vCenter Server. While VMware High Availability (HA) can protect against hardware and OS failures, VMware HA does not protect VMware vCenter Server against network or software failures, nor does it support failover from instances of VMware vCenter Server installed on physical servers.

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat delivers high availability and disaster recovery for VMware vCenter Server and all of its components – including the database and licensing server – with failover across the LAN or WAN. The software supports physical-to-virtual (P2V), physical-to-physical (P2P) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) failover, ensuring consistent operation of VMware vSphere when VMware vCenter Server is threatened by unplanned or planned downtime. The software monitors VMware vCenter Server and provides the broadest range of protection against application or operator errors, operating system or hardware failure, or external events.

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat is easy to install and configure. The software has no hardware configuration dependencies and automatically detects standard VMware vCenter Server components upon installation for instant monitoring and protection.