vCenter VM - Local or SAN Install?

[dflint]

What is the recommended location to install the VM running vCenter?

Local Storage or on the SAN?

Thanks in advance.

[Troy_Clavell]

either or works just fine.

If you install it on a SAN, you can then run it as a VM and utilize HA. We have both physical vCenter instances (installed on local disk) and virtual vCenter instances (running on SAN disk)

[znet98]

for VMs, better in SAN, it has a lot benefits, like management , extending, backup/restore, etc.;for vcenter, can be in either local or attached storage.

[Troy_Clavell]

sorry... I mis-read the question.

Yes, if you are going to run your vCenter as a VM, I would say SAN Disk all the way.

[jbogardus · Accepted solution]

As Troy indicated if you are running it in a VM, ideally you would want it to be on SAN disk. This is assuming you are using multiple ESX Hosts connected to the SAN. In this configuration you would be able to use VMotion when you plan to take an ESX Host offline, for upgrade, patching, or other maintenance, to make sure that VirtualCenter remains online. If the vCenter was a VM installed on local disk, or tied to just one host for some other reason, the VM environment becomes more difficult to manage with the impacts of taking that host offline sometimes.

[znet98]

i mis-understood your question too, if your vcenter running under VM, SAN is better.

But we are running it in a physical windows system seperately since it runs with our vcb proxy server at same machine.

[Josh26]

There's pros and cons of both approaches.

Putting it on a SAN gives you HA and other flexibility. For that situation where you need to down the SAN itself for maintenance, we placed ours locally so we could shutdown all VMs and manage that maintenance, and then bring them all back up from the vCenter machine. It's a different kind of flexibility.