Location of vCenter servers - Best Practice?

[philtomlinson]

Hi,

I have recently installed 2 vCenter servers to manage my hosts and I was wondering what the best practice is for where to have these located

Current setup

ESXI Hosts 1 - (3 Windows 2012 R2 VM`s)

ESXI Hosts 2 - (3 Windows 2012 R2 VM`s)

ESXI Hosts 3 - (3 Windows 2012 R2 VM`s) including my 2 vCenter Servers

Is it best practice to have these vCenter servers on a separate host to my other VM`s?

Regards

Phil

[snekkalapudi]

A dedicated management cluster is recommended for large infrastructure. A management cluster typically have 3 to 4 hosts with all solution stack deployed (like vCenter in your case and other solutions if any)

But if the infrastructure is small as in your case, you can continue to have vCenter on any of the 3 ESXi hosts along with your workloads but make sure to have HA & DRS enabled for high availability as per your vSphere license

[jpsider]

I agree with the other guy, but it also depends on your level of risk you are willing to accept. What will you lose if the vCenters go down? how quickly can you rebuild them? But in a small setup like this, there is not really much you can do.

What services are your vCenters delivering for you? are they really that important?  All things to consider, but best practice would be placing them in a location that they can exist in a HA/DRS cluster. But you don't really have that with 3 servers.