vCenter Database

[FOSKingston]

I have recently upgraded to vSphere & vCentre (4.0)

Under Esx 3 / 3.5 we ran Virtual Centre in a Vm & the database on a (almost) dedicated Physical machine.

Due to other issues I ended up having to dump the database & Virtual Center & rebuild from scratch.

Currently I have vCenter running on a Server2008 VM which also runs SQLexpress.

I want to seperate out the DB vCenter to difrent machines.

Personaly I had no trouble with Virtual Center as a VM & it was

documented as a suported option under 3.5. I'm not so sure about the DB

though.

So now the Question:

What are peoples opinions on Virtulizing the management DB &/or vCentre?

[azn2kew]

Well, people have been successfully deploy Oracle and SQL servers in production with heavy load no problems at all assuming you have the resources and infrastructure to handle it. In this case, vCenter server can be virtualize and the database can also be on a virtualize SQL 2008 server no problems. As you know, with vSphere everything is double in terms of resources support such as 8 vCPU and 255GB RAM so what applications that you can't virtualize? I would suggest you virtualize both SQL 2008 and vCenter on two seperate virtual machines and administer them with flexibility and high availability already built in with your HA and VMotion. If you need SQL 2008 cluster, then utilize MSCS in a virtual environment as well fully supported and function great.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[msemon1]

Yes, I agree. SQL express I think has a limitation of 8 ESX hosts and 50 VM's.

Mike

[dickybird]

Hi

It depends on your current datacenter and the growth you anticipate.

You can always put the DB on different machines(VM or Physical) as you can put the Vcenter in VM or Physical

Look at following for some helpful tip

[admin]

It is a good idea to separate DB server from vCenter server. There should not be any issues in installing vCenter and DB server on VMs also.

Thanks

Sandeep

[FOSKingston]

Thanks for that everyone

Although The document ( ) is VC 2.x I suspect the following is still relavant

"Sizing and Configuration"

"Dedicate the virtual machine to VirtualCenter. In particular, keep the VirtualCenter

database on a physical server or separate virtual machine, unless you are only running the

MSDE database for demonstration purposes. This will ensure that VirtualCenter will have"

The origonal documentation I saw (some years ago) strongly recomended against puttin the DB on a VM.

I ran CV in a VM quite happily since I setup the cluster & have been quite pleased with it.

I 'm now planning to run the DB in a VM too

KRis