vCenter in Essential

[aaparicio]

Hi.

I am starting with the virtualization with VMWare in my Company. We have bought one essential license for to start.

I'd like to know what capacities would add vCenter that vSphere Client for management the ESXi. I will only have one ESXi at the moment and I don't know if I'd have more capacities if I install vCenter than if I use only the vSpere Client.

Exist Documentation about recomendations for install and administrar ESXi? And for to pass one phisical server to vitual server?

Thanks.

[VMmatty]

vCenter provides centralized management for all of your ESX/ESXi hosts, even if there is just one of them. If you bought the Essentials or Essentials Plus bundle then you should have a version of vCenter included.

You won't be able to use any of the advanced features of ESXi with just one host (and also based on the license you own) but vCenter still provides lots of benefits. Here are a few:

1) Performance monitoring over time. The vSphere client shows mostly real time performance stats. vCenter will record those stats over time and let you view trending and capacity a lot better.

2) Cloning and templates become available with vCenter. These tools can greatly speed up the provisioning of new virtual machines and almost make vCenter worth it by itself.

3) Active Directory integration allows you to granularly control access to the environment based off of existing AD users/groups.

4) Plug-ins for VMware Converter make converting physical machines to virtual machines much easier (you can do this without the plug-in but the integration is nice).

There are lots of other reasons why vCenter is a great tool to have. It sounds like you own the license to use it so I would plan on doing so even for just one host.

[aaparicio]

Ok. Thanks for the explication.