Insatll View Connection Server on VM

[JoeyJoeJo]

This question is quite noob, so bear with me. I'm going to set up a test VMWare View environment and have a couple of questions.

Is it best practice to set up a separate physical machine to install VCenter/VMWare View on?

Right now I have one physical machine running VCenter. I really don't want to use it as a test bed for VMWare View in case something goes wrong.

I'd much ratehr install another instance ov VCenter on virtual machine but I don't think that's possible, or is it?

Cheers,

JJJ

[Lee_Collison]

The virtual center question really comes down to the type of licensing that will you purchase, if you purchase View Enterprise or Premier you can only manage your View deployment from this VC as well you can not run any virtual servers on the ESX host that are licensed with either software package. You can purchase just the Connection Broker then you can mnage both server and desktops from a single VC as well as host both servers and desktops on your current ESX servers. Now with that out of the way, you can easily manage 1000 virtual desktops from a guest Virtual Machine hosting Virtual Center, but what we see as best performance (and we call best practice) is always have the VDI Virtual Center as a physical Windows 2003 Standard 32 bit Server. The reason it is recommended that the VC be separate and physical is that the VC does the most work because it will be provisioning and managing all of the desktops.

On a side note, I recommend that you keep your desktops and servers located on separate ESX hosts, you will see a degrade in performance on the virtual servers if they are hosted with a large number of virtual desktops.

Always remember that a POC is that, a Proof of Concept. Production is that, production systems and these will operate differently from POC systems as they scale out.

Hope this helps. Lee

[hmartin]

I agree with Lee, especially on separating your virtual desktop and server workloads separate. To be clear, VMware View cannot be installed on your vCenter server. It must be installed on a separate server (physical or virtual). Our View server (we have only one at this point in our POC) is hosted on the same ESX host as the desktops. The thinking is that we have only one ESX server that's a single point of failure for the virtual desktops. When we stand up our second View server, it will, of course, be located on a separate ESX server.

If you're not immediately interested in View Composer, then there will be no changes to your vCenter server. Otherwise, you'll have to install the View Composer service on it. We've had no problems with our vCenter server since installing the View Composer server. However, see my comment here about being cautious about changes to your vCenter server after installing the View Composer service. Cheers.