Hi,
Here is my production setup at 3 sites.
1. vCenter Server - vCenter Server, web client, Update manager, syslog, coredump collector
2. vCenter Inventory server - Inventory service running on it
3. vCenter SSO server - SSO service running on it.
Sequence for installing services - first get ready SSO service then Inventory then vCenter server.
after that you can install other services.
initially we installed 5.1b, recently we installed updates and its running fine without any issue.
we are not using heartbeat, so I don't have any idea about it.
Thank you,
Haridas