vCenter necessity

[OliverEyeEm]

Hi All,

First post here, I'm sure many will follow...

Dumb question for now but since I haven't found a decent answer.

I have an extremely small environment right now (possibly will expand in the future but not soon) of a single host running ESXi 6.0 - Is vCenter Server Appliance necessary for anything on a single host environment or is management from the direct web interface sufficient?

Thanks in advance,

Oliver

[npadmani · Accepted solution]

if you have just one ESXi host in your environment, then vCenter server is not required.

Because in order to achieve vMotion, HA or DRS, you still need minimum two hosts with other additional requirements to fulfil.

[OliverEyeEm]

Thanks npadmani, that's pretty much what I assumed but I wanted to check first! Thanks again...

[NetworkNerd]

It's certainly not necessary for a single host, but if you have the Essentials bundle and have license to it and the backup APIs for 3rd party software, you can use it.  The alerting capabilities that vCenter gives you about performance issues with VMs or host hardware issues / warnings (that don't shut down the host) is quite helpful in troubleshooting.  And it can show you performance history over time for the host and its VMs.  Unless something has changed when the Embedded Host Web Client was deployed, my understanding is you cannot get this level of detail or history from connecting to the host directly without vCenter.

But if you have other utilities to monitor your host, then you are fine without it (especially if you don't have license to vCenter).