VMware Cloud Community
vitaprimo
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Is it safe to turn of long-term vCenter once vSAN is off?

Hey guys,

Last week(s) I spent it moving data off of vSAN because I managed to reduce my compute to a single hypervisor--well, with a couple of helpers, but those aren't vMotioning around, they are collect info, so basically everything's is stable, the VMs don't move big data. I think Storage DRS hasn't been triggered since I finished the move. I thought with just a single host, turning off vSAN was a smarter choice since at least VMs would be wholly contained within datastores instead of spread among the pool, lessening losses if when a disk fails and main backup got corrupted or something. For the I/O-needy there are fast NFS datastores and, just this same week to keep myself awake while data moved, I managed to *finally* boot of iSCSI, it wasn't easy nor a clean install, I merely made an image of the ESXi's boot disks then using RHEL mounted the iSCSI shares and restored the image. On the second boot it crashed, changed the LUNs the bound interfaces on ESXi, not vCenter, to the targets and from the degraded mode it booted on, it turn back to normal. I'm going into detail so if I'm forgetting something you can set me straight.

The one thing I use vCenter the most is for templates, I dread to make them but once they're done, make lots of backups and I'd guard them with the 3-headed dog (the one that sounds like the Kerberos protocol, also sounds like a beer ingredient) if I could. But once the now tiny datacenter is stable I don't think I have use for it. It yet another 12-14GB of freed memory, it's not scarce but could hurt, could it? Although I've read and heard many times over that "free memory is wasted memory". I no longer use vROps because it wans't teaching me anything new about about the systems anymore, I even removed the extension from vCenter already. Log Insights I do use, but more for other devices, rarely I pay attention from data coming from ESXi/vCenter, plus, my license is the basic one, the one unlocked by vCenter's and I'd be 1 or 2 connectors farther from reaching the limit. I don't know if vCenter+linkedhosts count as one or individually.

Anyway, this has turned into a letter, so I'm out and at your wisdom, could I inadvertently break something. Storage DRS is run managed by vCenter right? So if so, maybe I'd lose that, but the hypervisors hypersivor single, should be able to communicate still--but without the smarts and analytics and all that. I saved the original disks I cloned to the iSCSI shares just in case iSCSI booting somehow doesn't work without vCenter. Smiley Happy Thanks for your advice!

Tags (1)
Reply
0 Kudos
0 Replies