vCenter

We are building a new vCenter 6 U2.  Been going round and round between embedded versus external PSC.  We have other business entities running VMware, but they manage

themselves, at least for now.  Here at my location (corporate) we have 45 hosts and around 800 VMs.  Installing as embedded would be easier and should provide headroom

to increase the maximum number of hosts.  Installing with the PSC external may be of value should we have to hook into the other business entities, but also  poses concerns

about PSC HA, patch updates, backup\recovery, etc. There also appears to be more administration.  Our current 5.0 vCenter runs on physical hardware.  Some recommend sticking

with physical while others say go the virtual route.  Can anyone offer some advice on these questions ?  Thanks.

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Physical or Virtual vCenter?

Physical or virtual vCenter depends on your availability and recovery requirements of the vCenter Server. When using a virtual vCenter Server you can benefit from vSphere HA and DRS for the availability of the vCenter Server. A physical vCenter Server is almost always choosen because it will be available when you virtual infrastructure is not. But what about services it depends on like DNS and Active Directory for authentication? If these services are virtual then having a physical vCenter Server doesn't make sense.

Also, keep in mind that VMware is moving to the virtual appliance and with a physical vCenter Server it is only possible to install vCenter Server for Windows which will be deprecated in future releases.

Embedded or External PSC?

A embedded PSC does have it's advantages regarding manageability, only 1 VM needs to be managed. It's possible to migrate from an embedded PSC to a external PSC. If you have no use case for an external PSC, do not use it. You can use the vCenter topology decision tree poster to make the decision about an embbed or external PSC. http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2016/04/vSphere_Topology_Decision_Tree_Poster-v5_0804016.pdf

If the decision tree doesn't answer you question let me know. I'm working on the 6.5 update and would certainly like to incorporate any feedback.

It really boils down to 1 question - Do you need Enhanced Linked Mode? It sounds like you don't right now but might in the future. The thing is, there's no way to merge or otherwise combine two different SSO Domains (at least not as of today). So, I wouldn't add the complexity of an external PSC if you don't need it today. So, with the limited information we have, I'd say stick with embedded PSC.

There has been some discussion on a DR site.  Nothing is in place right now.  It could be 6-12 months before a DR site is available.  If I build vCenter with embedded PSC what factors come into play when we start using SRM ?

Would the embedded PSC need to be moved to external for SRM and Linked Mode ?    

You can always reconfigure from an embedded PSC to an external PSC if your DR site comes to fruition. With SRM, I believe an external PSC is recommended but I'd have to defer to the SRM folks for confirmation.

In the past I liked the idea of vCenter being physical since we have on-going issues with our iSCSI connected SAN storage.  Should there be high latency or lost access to storage then vCenter can be unavailable for a time.

On the other hand going the virtual route does add HA & DRS and would use the same backup process as used for all the other VMs.  Our AD and DNS are servers are split between physical and virtual so should vCenter be down we can

still function to some extent with .  vCenter appliance has been behind on features compared to the Windows install.  Is that still the case with version 6.0 ?  Should I focus on the appliance version ?

We don't know when exactly, but we do want to deprecate the Windows-based vCenter. In 6.0, the VCSA has feature and scale parity with Windows. The only exception is that VUM still requires  Windows. However, in 6.5, the VCSA has surpassed Windows in features and performance while VUM has been integrated into the appliance. I would not invest any more time in the Windows-installabel. The appliance model is the future.