vCenter

I recently renewed my ESX 3.x licensing to obtain vSphere license keys. I am now looking into upgrading my hosts from ESX 3.5 u5 to vSphere. The esx 3.5 vCenter database is hosted on a physical SQL 2000 server. I have purchased licensing for MS SQL 2005, but I don't want to do a inplace upgrade on the physical virtual center box for lots of reasons that don't pertain to this community. So now I am at a crossroad, do I set up a new VM on the existing esx 3.5 hosts to install vCenter and SQL 2005 to restore the existing vc database to? Or should I look at purchasing a new physical server to dedicate to vCenter and the vCenter MS SQL 2005 database?

In my enviroment, I have 3 ESX hosts running on blades with a total of 10 VM's running. In the future I'm looking to virtualize a couple of SQL boxes once I get vSphere running. If you were me what would you do with vCenter?

as the old saying goes "eat your own dog food"

For us, we have 9 vCenter instances and all run as a VM, with the exception of 3. When that enviornment get's updated to vSphere4, the vCenter Servers will be VM's.

This setup is fully supported and works great. Plus you get the benefit of HA/DRS. I would suggest setting your restart priority to high for your vCenter VM.

Here's a good document as well

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11197

hmm...It is the most controvertial topic.......As suggested by Troy, having VC on virtual machine is not that risky.....I have installed my VC on physical as well as on virtual machine ....I have created two databases each vC has its own database and configured replication between both database. So that both the database are up to date .....I have my physical VC on seprate network....and both databases are on different network.....So incase of failure of physical VC we can bring our virtual VC up with updated database..VC database is on VM network