vCenter

Hello Everyone,

I had a discussion with the network architect. I have asked him if they thought about this solution. He said there was this time were a VMware specialist told him that it wasn't a good idea. Because, if the host in which the VCenter is housed crashes, they will have big problems. I told him if the HA is "Enable" it wouldn't be a problem. He said that the specialist had said that this function does not work all the time. The specialist had told him that if he had the opportunity to have a physical server it would be better. I I told him, if you have any maintenance or a physical problem occur on this server you are no better and restore takes longer to do.

Their environment is a VMware infrastructure 3.5 and they are thinking of update to VShpere 4 and maybe accomplish this solution at the same time.

Is the architect on the right track and should we leave this as is or is my statement a good idea?

if my statement makes since, I want to know if someone has documentation for this solution to insure him this might be a good solution and be able to benefit all options with VSphere 4.

Thank you.

vCenter running as a VM is 100% supported. The only feature you lose if vCenter is down is DRS(vMotion), but HA will continue to function. My only suggestion would be to set your restart priority to HIGH for your vCenter VM.

Still today, the most important part of your vCenter instance is it's DB. If anything is to go physical, that is what I would recommend. To take it even a little further, i would consider a MSCS.

If you take good care of your DB you could recover from a vCenter failure really as quickly as you can deploy a new VM and install the vCenter application, setup your ODBC connection and go ( 20 - 30 minutes).

As the old saying goes "eat your own dogfood".

also, see page 101

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40_u1/vsp_40_u1_esx_vc_installation_guide.pdf

As troy said it is 100% supported - in fact if vCenter were to crash nothing would happen to the running ESX hosts - you would just lose the ability to centrally manange your ESX servers, vmotion, DRS - as you pointed out HA will continue to work and if you ar eusing ditributed switches those will continue to work as well -

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Hello and thank you for your answers,

1. If Vmotion isn't working what happens to the infrastructure if the option Fully Automated is enabled in the cluster options in VMware DRS?

Does the VM crash?

Will their be any corruptions?

2. Is their alot of information or bandwith beteewn VCenter and the DB that is on other serveur?

3. If you are using the VCenter Link-Mode for an other Vcenter, how is this communicating?

Is it communicating directly to the BD serveur?

What is the bandwith between this two Virtual Center?

Thank you.

1) It is vCenetr that handles the DRS calculations so DRS is not working either and the VM stays where it is at

2) There is some and depends on the size of your environment - everything gets stored in that DB including inventory, settings and performance data

3) Link Mode will stop working because it is that VC that is used for management of its VMs - linked mode is designed to allow you to connect to a single VC instance and gain access to all VCs you want to manage - it does not take over the management -

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