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lowemic1
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Virtual Center - new deploy best practices

We currently have 3 hosts running ESX 3 and are getting ready to drop in a 4th and manage them with Virtual Center. I'm just wondering what best practices are for picking a machine to run Virtual Center on. Should this be a seperate machine with nothing else running on it? I've read the minimum requirements, what realistically would you guys run this on? Also is it possible to run Virtual Center as a virtual machine on one of the hosts? That seems like maybe not the neatest way of doing it but I hate to dedicate a physical machine to something that doesn't really need it.

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StorageMonkeys
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I'm not sure if this is out of date or not... but it may help:

-Tim Masters

Storage Monkeys - Social networking for storage users

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StorageMonkeys
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I'm not sure if this is out of date or not... but it may help:

-Tim Masters

Storage Monkeys - Social networking for storage users

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chandlm
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I run VC as a VM in order to take advantage of HA. I do disable it from running in DRS so that I always know which host it is running on in case there is an outage of some type. I would also look at keeping the DB on a separate server if possible (do you have a physical box already hosting SQL databases?).

If for no other reason, it is nice to not have to be your own exception to a 'virtual first' rule by needing a physical box to manage your virtual environment Smiley Happy

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

Message was edited by: chandlm (added link)

lowemic1
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that PDF is dated but the data is still relevent.

It does make better sense to think about running Virtual Center on a VM if you use a database on another physical machine rather than use the SQL express and have a lone physical machine running everything. I'll have to see about SQL servers that might be free, I know we've done multiple databases on one SQL server in the past and they didn;t want to play nice for some reason (before my time). Thanks guys anyone else want to chime in on their setups or past setups?

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chandlm
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Not sure if maybe the SQL problems before your time were just due to bad planning but in general I've always done what I could to have SQL servers set up to provide shared services just because of the cost of licensing. As long as the app is not written poorly and you size everything right you shouldn't have any problems with these types of small DBs. Of course, if you have enormous applications using enormous SQL databases that may not always be the case...

kjb007
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I use vc in a vm. The vm houses vc and sql for now, and I've had no issues so far with 100+ vm's on it.

-KjB

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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jamieorth
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We just took a pServer VC and migrated it to a VM. As stated above this gives you the benefit of HA/DRS. Also, we are also replicating this VM to our DR site until we get SRM up and going which will require a 2nd VC. Looking at some of the SRM docs it looks like a physical server is recommended, so I have to get with my TAM to discuss this. Our VC has sql on the same server and we have 10 hosts with 70+ vm's with no issues.

Regards...

Jamie

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lowemic1
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what kind of specs are you carving out for your Virtual Center VM's to run with? All out hosts are running Harpertown's on the 1600mhz bus.

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