what is the best placement of vcenter in my scenario

[mla_]

Hello,

I need an advice for the best placement of vCenter and root DC.

New installation: 2 ESXi vSphere hosts. Currently 2 vm DCs, 2003 AD. There is the new physical 2008 server dedicated for backup with attached tape.

BackupExec software is not installed yet.

1. What will be the best placement of vCenter. On backup server that should run BackupExec software or on vm?

2. Is it good idea at all to place vCenter with BackupExec(with SQL server) on the physical machine?

3. is it a good idea to assign DC role (AD 2008) on physical server with BackupExec?

Please elaborate each answer with pros and cons.

Thanks.

Michael.

[idle-jam]

if it's my case, i would place my vcenter as virtual machine. the vcenter will get HA as well. i get to backup using backup exec. it's rather weird to backup a backup server. and then the btter practice of having a AD in the physical server.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

I would keep both the DC and vCenter servers as virtual.  It's not particularly bad to combine roles especially if you expect the host to be under utilized.  But if you deploy the DC and vCenter roles within unique VMs then you have far less chance of a software conflict and you can take advantage of HA for them.

[mla_]

idle-jam wrote:

if it's my case, i would place my vcenter as virtual machine. the vcenter will get HA as well. i get to backup using backup exec. it's rather weird to backup a backup server. and then the btter practice of having a AD in the physical server.

About backup.

The backup is organized this way:

The data on each server is backuped with NT backup on dedicated partition. Then copied to backup server. Then Backup Exec installed on Backup server dumping collected data to tape. This was an optimal DATA backup plan on pre virtualization environment. That's why in a new virtualized environment backup server has the same function.

VMs backup should be reviewed.

From both answers I understood and totally agree that vCenter should be placed on VM for many reasons.

Personally, I prefer to have AD 2008 root DC on the physical Backup server, because finally it is just file server (backup copies).

And sure I would place DC on each host.

Please answer:

Could I say that placing vCenter, iSCSI tools, DNS and DHCP on backup machine and plus install Backup Exec+SQLExpress is a bad idea if compare to

making vCenter on dedicated VM?

[idle-jam]

regardless where you install your AD roles, just make sure you have another redundant copy as a virtual machine. also if possible go get agent for vmware infrastructure. with that you could backup unlimited virtual machine image and file level by buying the number of host license. that should be the way to backup.

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

If you have no license limitation, I suggest to have dedicated VM for DCs, DHCP and vCenter Server.

DNS servers can stay with DCs.

About your backup server, you can have a physical DC on it (I've see this solution many times).

But if you have at leasts two virtual AD DC on different hosts, then there is not really needs.

About vCenter in virtual see also:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11197

Andre

[mla_]

Thanks to all.