VMware has somewhat interestingly announced the end of availability of its vCenter Heartbeat product, which is designed to protect vCenter Server against application, operating system, hardware and network failures, and other kinds of outages.

The news is somewhat unexpected, and will leave some wondering if that leaves a gap in VMware’s security. vCenter Heartbeat wasn’t a critical component, but it’s always good for management tools to pack some extra resilience.

But the point is that loss of access to vCenter isn’t a catastrophic failure. Just because vCenter’s out of action, it doesn’t mean vSphere will stop running. Indeed, vSphere comes with a High Availability option that ensures it and virtual machines attached to it will never stop running.

VMware addresses these concerns in an announcement about the product’s end of availability. It asks “Are we getting away from protecting vCenter?”, and provides the following answer:

“Not by a long shot. We have big plans in this space. vCenter has become a very critical component of the infrastructure and we’re looking at lots of different means by which you can protect it.”

Curiously, an FAQ about the end of availability linked to that page notes that “There are no immediate plans to introduce another product”. That’s not to say these are conflicting statements – rather, it could be that VMware is planning on introducing a different kind of protection for vCenter, one that doesn’t come packaged as a brand new product.

It’s likely we’ll find out soon enough. VMWorld in San Francisco is less than three months away, and there’s a good chance we’ll see something announced there. Supposing VMware sticks to the script we can expect to see a brand new vSphere release. Previous releases have tended to be about scale with VMware boasting about the ability to virtualize just about anything. Perhaps the demise of Heartbeat is a sign that resilience will be a key theme of its next release?

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