Moving Inventory Service to Another Server

[OsburnM]

Does anyone have any suggestions or pointers to articles on moving the inventory service of an existing environment to its own dedicated server?

We are planning our vSphere 5.1 upgrade from 5.0 and currently Inventory Services are running on the same server as vCenter.  Our environment is quite large (400 hosts & 6000+ VMs) and vCenter has been running slow for some time.  I'm wondering if I can move the Inventory Service to another server during our upgrade.

Thanks for any advice!

[vHaridas]

You can remove Inventory service from vCenter server.

Steps -

1. prepare Temporary SSO server for Inventory service upgrade on current vcenter 5.0 server.

2. Upgrade  Inventory service (vCenter 5.0) to 5.1

3. Remove Inventory service from 5.0 server, using Add/Remove programs.

4. Remove temporary SSO server.

Later on you can install SSO and Inventory service other servers and then you can upgrade vCenter 5.0 to 5.1

you can see my post about how I upgraded my vCenter 5.0 to 5.1

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/434776

-

Hari

[OsburnM]

Hari,

Thank you for your response.  I've done a bit more digging and between your suggestions and some VMware Install documentation on SSO & Inventory Services (the official 5.1 docs), I think I've come up with my solution.  Let me know if you think this looks off..

1. Install SSO on new dedicated server

2. Install/upgrade Inventory Services on existing 5.0 vCenter server

3. Upgrade vCenter server to 5.1 & point Inventory Services to itself

4. Backup Inventory Services and move backup file to new Inventory Services server

5. Install Inventory Services on NEW server

6. Restore Inventory Services from backup file

7. Remove Inventory Services from vCenter Server add/remove programs

8. ReInstall vCenter 5.1 and point to NEW Inventory Services server

I think that's the correct order.

[markdjones82]

I was told by vmware support to uninstall the vcetner service first and then install the 5.1 Vcenter service, but I have not tested in the lab first.  Is there any need to really backup the inventory service?  I would think it would repopulate after reinstalling

[Zsoldier]

The only reason you would need to backup and redeploy the inventory services is if you are using the new 'tags' feature.  Otherwise, you can just uninstall and redeploy w/o restoring from backup.

[OsburnM]

Good to know, thanks!

We use custom attributes for "tags" (like, application, vendor, etc...)...  I don't have any experience with this new tags feature.  Is it better than custom annotations?

[markdjones82]

Osburn,

  This is the steps I am going to be testing and I think might reduce some of yours if you don't need to backup the DB and it doesn't call for a dummy SSO server.  I will probably be testing this method in my lab this week. Vmware support has said this should work, but I'll post my results once I can get to it.

Install SSO

Install Inventory service on new server

Uninstall 5.0 Vcenter service on app server which in turn uninstalls inventory service

Install 5.1 vcenter service and point to new inventory server

Install Web client

[OsburnM]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the confirmation.  I actually came to the same conclusion myself with my own lab last night & today.

As of right now I have a new server that'll be my SSO & Inventory Services server.  I have the SSO DB already built and SSO and Inventory Services installed and ready to go.  Just waiting for the scheduled downtime now to go to 5.1-U1 this weekend. 

Anyone have any thoughts on the specs for this new SSO/Inventory server?  VM has plenty of "min" specs on a separate SSO server and a separate Inventory server; but, truth is, I have a big environment with almost 400 hosts and 6400 guests.  So JVM Heap Size is telling me 12GB-- which to me sounds like a VM at least 12GB in memory plus a gig for OS and a gig for SSO...  which should translate to a 2vcpu & 14gb ram VM.

Thoughts?