I'm using VMware/vSphere in my home development and testing environment and I was wondering which had lower hardware requirements (RAM/CPU):
vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)
or
vCenter Server for Windows
I'm only running 1 ESXi host with about ~25 virtual machines. I only really need the ability to use the new vSphere Web Client and create/deploy virtual machine templates.
I already have a MS SQL Server 2008 R2 server running on my network, so using the embedded database in vCSA is a bit of a waste...
The bottom line is that I'd like to use the least amount of resources possible. I'm hoping to run the vCenter Server with 4 GB of RAM (seems OK, but does the Web Client (server) require an additional 2 GB?)
EDIT: Also, I just realized that I use Windows Server 2008 R2 (with vCenter Server for Windows), that the OS will most likely share a lot of memory pages because I also run other W2K8 servers. If I install vCSA then the entire OS will not be sharing any memory because I don't run SUSE/CentOS (whatever it uses) virtual machines.
As I recall the hardware requirements are comparable and they should work with 4 GB and dual vcpu - you will get some memory savings with TPS with the installed vCenetr because of the common windows OS -
Consider the shortfalls of the vCenter appliance such as No Update Manager, No Linked-Mode, No support for VSA, No Support for Heartbeat server, etc.