vCenter Server 5 install in a VM or Not?

[teksup88]

Hi to all.

We have a small assisted living healthcare environment with about a dozen sites/servers

One server has 3 VMw4 vms on it.

We received two new servers with ESXi 5 installed. They will host several Windows server vms mostly migrations of current VMw4.

I want to install vCenter Server 5 to manage them.

From my VMware book by Lowe he mentions that installing the vCenter server in a VM has limitations.

He mentions cold migration, cloning and editing hardware are not available.

Also he mentions considerations with using a distributed virtual switch.

Ufortunately he doesn't go into any detail.

But there seem to be advantages such as backing up the server and quick restore when using a vm.

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

[ElevenB2003]

vCenter works great as a VM.  I have seen it done both ways but (physical/virtual) but at the end of the day, the benefits of having a virtual vCenter outweigh a dedicated physical box running vCenter.

[ezzeldin72 · Accepted solution]

hi,

it is one of the common Design decision. now VMware best practice is to use a virtual machine.

some of the benefits you can get are:-

The vCenter Server system can be restarted in a vSphere High Availability cluster

Virtual machine CPU and memory resources can be easily resized. The vCenter Server system also benefits from vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster workload balancing.

You can easily back up or re-create a virtual machine as necessary.

having it as physical Machine will have some drawbacks like:-

To provide availability, you must purchase and use additional software like vCenter Server Heartbeat or a third-party clustering solution.

You must properly size the physical machine resources.

You must have a separate system and use imaging software to take a snapshot of a physical machine.

[teksup88]

Thanks for the great info