This article:
http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/column/0,294698,sid203_gci1512874,00.html?
says it's best practice. It then goes on to raise a concern with the Update Manager. I don't use update manager, so I'm interested in whether anyone can confirm and point me to which document from VMware says that vCenter is recommended to run on virtual machine as "best practice".
I am more willing to go that way than before, but I am still cautious when I consider complexities of failures.
If the ESX host running vCenter server completely failed, then, yes, vCenter would restart on another host.
But there are far more possibilities of problems than that. What if the data store becomes unavailable? What if the ESX host hangs with a problem that ties up the CPU?
Being extremely cautious, I can't get away from the fact that virutalizing vCenter fundamentally means it having more complexity in the layers beneath it and therefore more possibilities for failure of the failover are introduced.
I know running vCenter on physical means that layer can still fail, but we're monitoring all our physical servers that run our ESX hosts.
Putting a hypervisor on them doesn't prevent us from needing to deal with local disk/network/fibre channel/memory problems.
searching VMware I found a doc that was written in 2009, not sure if it's still the latest gospel. I'll raise a support call to ask VMware, but first wanted to see if you can give me a link to the answer.
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11197
Interesting that this doc on VMware's site actually links back to the one on techtarget's site. That's great, but I want the VMware reference that the techtarget article mentions.
cheers in advance for your time and help.
Generous points and enthusiastic kudos to anyone who can shed light here.
cheers,
Kevin
