VMware has announced the end of availability for vCenter Server Heartbeat which was designed to make your vCenter server highly available.

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server-heartbeat/

End of life will be June 2, 2014.

End of support is September 19, 2018.

What does this mean?

• You can no longer purchase vCenter Server Heartbeat.
• Physical vCenter Servers are less viable with no easy way to make them highly available.
• vCenter Server Appliance is closer to feature parity with Windows version.

What should I do?

• Deploy your vCenter Server as a VM. (Possibly into a separate “Management” cluster.)
• Use vSphere features such as HA to keep it available through hardware failures.
• **Backup your vCenter Server well and backup often. **

As we use more distributed and software defined features such as Virtual Distributed Switches, VSAN, NSX etc, the availability of our vCenter Servers is becoming increasingly important, though VMware has no plans to replace the product;  “There are no immediate plans to introduce another product.”