Can anyone suggest what is the VMware recommendations to use VC Database remote or local ? Also please help me to get is there any KB article for this recommendation.

[UmaMaheshTallur]

Can anyone suggest what is the VMware recommendations to use VC Database remote or local ? Also please help me to get is there any KB article for this recommendation.

Your help would be appriciated.

Regards,

Mahesh.

[PramodKhalate]

Hi UmaMaheshTall,

There is no easy answer on this one, and it depends on a variety of factors in your environment.  How resilient is your current physical SQL environment?  Do you have dedicated/skilled/competent DBAs on staff that you can depend on?  How virtualized is your environment, and do you need this self-containment in order to quickly power up other services/servers that the physical environment may have dependencies on?  Who will be responsible for the SQL server installed on this dedicated vCenter/SQL server?  Do you have the required licenses, or will there be additional costs involved?  There are many factors in your environment that will shape this unique decision.

With all that being said, I like the idea of vCenter in a VM with the backend database on a physical SQL Server with redundancy built into the design and competent people managing it.

Thanks

Pramod

[Sreejesh_D]

By mentioning local do you mean the bundled MS SQL server express edition? If so, it depends on the size of your infrastructure.

With the SQL Server Express edition database, vCenter can support up to 5 VMware ESX hosts and 50 virtual machines in the inventory. If your environment is bigger than that or there are chances to get this scaled up in near future then I would suggest  to go for an enterprise database software which are supported by vCenter Server. Eg: Oracle, MS SQL server (standard, enterprise, datacenter), IBM DB2

vCenter server and database server (except bundled SQL server express) are installed on the same Physial server or a VM are not recommended.

Its good to keep the database on a seperate VM/Physical server for better administration, backup and to avoid failures.

Please refer the following best practise guide . Section 5.8 for Database  guidelines.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsp_41_perf_VC_Best_Practices.pdf

We can see the compatible databases to each vCenter releases in VMware Compatibility matrix.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php

[rpotru]

Yes. If your environment is quite bigger. Definitely go for SQL or Oracle on a sepearte server and create ODBC connections from vCenter Server.

It is always nice to have VC and its database on different servers and you should perform SQL backups every day by running schedules. We have run in to some issues. So, DBA should be required to manage these considering your environment is quite bigger. There are VMware articles out there on how to install and configure this(both SQL and Oracle).

[UmaMaheshTallur]

Thankq very much for your suggestions, In our environment we are running with 25GB DB remotely on a VM. But we are frequently receiving performance issues with VC and its going down very frequently. When VMware analyzed the logs they could see some connectivity loss issues with DB, also verified from networking end and there was no issues.

Finally we decided to run DB locally from VC server, please let me know if may have to pay for this decision in future or it could run very smoothly ?

[Sreejesh_D]

Uma,

instead of finding the root cause for the issue we are going for a workaround which is not recommended. Running DB (except bundled SQL express) and vCenter on same VM is not a recommended configuration.

[rpotru]

Agree with yezdi. If you run both vc and its db on the same VM, you will see the resource contention on this VM when you have many reads and writes are happening across VC db. Best practice is to use 2 VM's seperately.