Virtual Center planning

[jspilon]

Hello,

We will deploy a VC in the near future. We have starter ESX hosts and we will be adding Enterprise hosts with VMOTION capability. The storage will be on a SAN.

Does the VC need access to the datastores for VMOTION.

I am asking this question to evaluate if the need for fiber adapters on the VC server will be required.

TIA

[cmsJustin]

VirtualCenter does not, but all ESX hosts do.

Have you considered iSCSI instead of FC for your SAN?

[cmsJustin]

Also, it is ok to run VirtualCenter in a VM if you'd like to.

[jspilon]

Is there any use of having VC connected to the Fiber network?

We already have the SAN and the Switches... would using iSCSI would work with any SAN, what are the pros and cons?

[jspilon]

Wouldn't it cause issues for deploying templates ?

Are setup would use NFS for the templates datastore. The VC will have access to that source datastore (nfs) but not to the target (san).

I am not sure I get this part correctly.

[cmsJustin · Accepted solution]

When VirtualCenter does a task, such as a cold-migration of a VM or template, it does it using the ESX server. It basically just tells the ESX server to do things. So only your ESX servers need access to both your SAN and NAS to be able to move images in between them.

You can also connect the VC client directly to an ESX server without the VC server.

You could also use SCP to copy files from your NAS to and store on an ESX server but that isn't recommended due to performance.

[cmsJustin]

Is there any use of having VC connected to the Fiber

network?

We already have the SAN and the Switches... would

using iSCSI would work with any SAN, what are the

pros and cons?

I didn't know you already had the SAN. There really is no use having the VirtualCenter server connected to the SAN. It justs tells the ESX servers what to do.

And like I said you can virtualize it without issues.

[cmsJustin]

Although it is a good practice to have the VirtualCenter machine also on your VMware subnet (if you have one):

We have:

LAN: 2 ESX servers connected

SAN: 2 ESX servers, 1 iSCSI SAN array

VMware: 2 ESX servers

The VMware and SAN VLANs are redundant.