Do you know where your vCenter sever is?

vCenter is one of those servers that at first was not a good candidate for virtualization but with vSphere 4 being able to handle much higher loads than VI3 or older versions of VMware it has become more and more common to find vCenter being virtualized. It is even now recommended by VMware to virtualize it and it makes for good dog food. We cannot expect our tier one app admis to take the plunge if we won’t do it ourselves now can we?

One reason I have heard for not virtualizing vCenter is “if something goes wrong how do I get to it?” I have to admit having the environment down and having to hunt for the vCenter server is not a good time. I resolved this issue by creating a new alarm to alert me whenever vCenter migrates from one Host to another and send me an email.

Here is how I did it.

Step 1. Go to the alarms tab and click the definitions button.

Step 2. Just right click and select new alarm from the context menu.

This will bring up the Alarm settings dialog box.

Step 3. Give it a good name and description. Also select the second radio button.

Step 4. Select the triggers tab and click Add. This will populate a generic Event.

Step 5. At this point click on the Event and select the “VM migrated” option and "DRS VM migrated".
VM migrated tells you when someone initiated a vMotion and DRS VM migrated tells you when the system moved.

Step 6. Click on Advanced under the Conditions heading and click add.

This will add a new event argument. At this point click on the dropdown for the Argument and select “VM name”.

Then select value and add the name of your vCenter server. In this case it is vCenter1, when this is done click OK.

Step 7. Click on the Actions tab and click Add.

This will populate a new Action which by default is “send a notification email” which is what we want.

Next change the alert level from Yellow -> to Red to be Green-> to Yellow.

The last step for in this screen will be to add an email address.

Then click ok.

Step 8. Now it is time to test it. To do this just migrate the vCenter VM from one host to another and you should get an email.

This setup will allow you to always know where your vCenter server is and so you never have to worry about where it is in case of a bad day.