Multiple vCenter in same cluster

[bvaneman]

I have what may be a dumb question, so I appologize in advance.

I am new with the company I am at and have been tasked with adding a second vCenter instance at our headquarters.  This is intended to manage the same hosts/VMs that our current vCenter is.  I have 6 hosts running ESXi 7.03.  My current vCenter says it is running on "host 3", but I was under the impression that vCenter had to run on it's on own host; seperate from the ESX hosts in the cluster running the VMs.

Do I need another physical machine to install/run the second instance of vCenter on?  Or can I run it on an existing host in the cluster?

Thank you,

Brian

[scott28tt]

Each ESXi host can only be managed by a single vCenter Server instance, are you trying to do this as part of an upgrade/migration or for some other reason?

The vCenter Server VM can be run on one of the ESXi hosts that it is managing.

[bvaneman]

Thanks for the quick reply Scott.

The idea was to have two vCenter instances for redundancy purposes.  But if you are saying each host can only be managed by one vcenter then maybe it doesn't make sense.

I was under the impression that using enhanced link mode, you could have two vCenters managing the same hosts, but if that is not the case, then I will re-evaluate and see if this is a moot objective.

Thanks,

Brian

[scott28tt]

I see these as your options, Enhanced Linked Mode or vCenter High Availability:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-vcenter-installation/GUID-4394EA1C-0800-4A6A-A...

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-availability/GUID-4A626993-A829-495C-9659-F64B...

You could also rely on regular vSphere High Availability, since VCSA is just a VM:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-availability/GUID-5432CA24-14F1-44E3-87FB-61D9...

Others might have different suggestions.

[bvaneman]

Thanks for your help.

[IRIX201110141]

Hello,

i think you have ask two different questions.

1. Its not a problem to run multiple VCSA on the same Hosts/Cluster or Infrastructure because it doesnt mean that a VCSA need to manage the underlying Hosts. Think about a dedicated Management Cluster with dozen of Multitenant Service VMs.

2. About the redundancy thats what vCenter HA is used for. It creates a 3 VCSA  Active/Passive Application Cluster. Even in some larger SMB setup i dont see this often.

The VCSA LinkMode solves a different problem. Having a single pane of glass when running multiple vCSA on different location or purposes.

Regards,
Joerg