VC on Host or No

[texasjohn]

I have just got my second ESX enterprise license and Virtual Center. I was wondering if its better to have VC on a VM or on a stand-a-lone server. What is the "best practice"?

[rschmidt1300]

Here is a link to a VMware document that says it is fully supported running on a virtual machine.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_vc_in_vm.pdf

My understanding was that if you can afford the hardware you would be better off having VirtualCenter running on dedicated hardware and possibly have a backup installation running in a virtual machine.

[JDLangdon]

The answer to your question is "It Depends." THere are some really nice advantages to having VC installed on a V (snap shots prior to upgrades) but unless you have HA and DRS configured, you could end up in a situation where the server hosting the VC VM crashes abd you could be left without a VC to troubleshoot.

Jason

[texasjohn]

Right now I have one ESX server but am planning to bring another one up next week with vetual center. I am planning to do HA

[esiebert7625]

You can always connect to the ESX server directly with the VIC if the VC VM is unavailable. HA will continue to work with the VC server down, DRS will not.

[VirtualNoitall]

Hello,

For us it comes down to resources. We opted for physical implementation because we have a large number of concurrent connections and a large ESX server farm with 500+ virtual machines and growing. We have a 2 x CPU, 4GB RAM server ( required to hit the vc maximums for sessions and guests ) running VC.

Having it in a vm makes HA very easy so if you don't have the big resource requirements I would start there.

[J-D]

Hi,

I normally prefer to have the VC on a physical machine but I ended up installing it in a VM in my last VMware project.

The reason is that VCB must not be installed on the same server which also is VC. We noticed that deploying templates didn't work if VCB is installed on it. This phenomenon can be found on the VMware KB. The latest VC build still does not fix this issue.

We needed the physical server for VCB, management tools such als Altiris RDP and backup. As VC could not be installed on it, we installed it together with the license server and MSDE in a VM. We chose MSDE as this customer only has 2 ESX servers and MSDE should suffice there imho.

HTH.

[J-D]

Hi,

giving points to people who answer correctly and help you is a nice way of thanking them.

J.

[GaryJBlake]

You should also factor in the licensing method you are using, with VI3 you can use central licensing server this is normally installed on the VC server. If you are running this in a VM and you loose it your ESX servers will continue to function for 14 days, after which you will not be able to power a VM on. Recommendation is to ensure that at least one ESX host is configure for host based licensing.

In terms of my best practise, I would always opt for a physical server for VC, this ensures there is no performance impacts with management (VC VM running along side other heavily utilised VMs) and you have a standard licensing method across the board.