View 4.0's VCenter

[Chicagojsh001]

I have licensed Vmware View 4.0(and now 4.5) and installed Vcenter on a virtual machine instead of a physical machine. I'm now begining to see why I should have done it on a physical machine. For instance when I run the update manager I can't update the esx host that contains the vcenter server among some other annoyances.

I wanted to install a second vcenter server on a physical machine in linked clone, and run both if allowed for redundency, and if not alowed via license then I want to just move it to the physical machine.

The databases are stored in MSSQL on a differnet server, so it should be easy to do the move if need be, but I think the best would be linked mode, then I could use the one on the physical machine to do the updates and such and just move the virtual one off the server while doing patches/updates.

Questions I'm having trouble finding out.

1) If I installed Fondation instead of premier, can I just install premier? (and if not too basic of question..how do I know what I installed)

2) Is it just a license thing and I can just swap license keys?

3) If I install Vcenter Premier on the physical server and point it to the same database, could I then point viewmanger to that vcenter install, then shut down the VM copy of vcenter? Could I do this mid-day you think? I only have about 30 view clients running....the way it looks it shouldn't really effect anyone much at all since I'm installing side by side and won't be takign down the first till the second comes up?

4) I've taken a "Disaster Recovery" backup of vcenter, and will do a snapshot just before, along with the SQL database for rollback purposes...sound safe?

Anyhow just looking for thoughts and suggestions.

Josh

[eeg3]

Linked mode does not provide redundancy. If you want redundancy, check out vCenter Server Heartbeat.

Also, why can't you just vMotion vCenter to another host if you need to upgrade that specific one? Virtualized vCenter is fully supported.

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[mittim12]

1: You could tell by looking at the license you installed

2: Should be able to swap license keys for vCenter. When in vCenter client look under vCenter settings and licensing. Should let you add a different license.

3: You should be able to but I would make sure that the versions were the same to mitigate any issues.

4: Backup of the SQL database is the most important part.

You could keep it virtual as the other poster said.

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[Chicagojsh001]

No SAN to use VMotion and I didn't think NAS would be a good idea for

vcenter to run on :).

I'll look into the vCenter Server Heartbeat that you recommend...thanks

Josh

[Chicagojsh001]

So then linked mode configuration is really just to have faster access

to vcenter from say a remote location?

[mittim12]

I always looked at linked mode as a method to extend the vCenter once you hit the maximum number of Host, Guest, etc that vCenter could manage.

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[eeg3]

It's really meant so you can tie two separate vCenters together and view them under the same vSphere client connection. For example, if you had 2 sites (e.g. one in NYC and one in LA), you could have a vCenter instance local to those host sites, but not have to open two clients to manage them.

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[Chicagojsh001]

The other problem I have with virtual that I'm not certain I mentioned

is performance during patching. Last weekend I patched for the first

time and it seemed fine, but then on Monday at some point update manager

either started doing something else or was still patching and basically

brought my system to a crawl.

I stopped the update manager service and within seconds performance was

back to very good...the vcenter server basically pegged the

processor...I haven't done much research as to why it pegged the

processor...probably would be smart to look into that ehh .