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ChrisI88
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

How to run VCSA outside the environment it is managing ?

We are in the planning stages of migrating our vsphere 6.5 environment to either 6.7 or 7.0.

Our current vCenter is 6.5 on Windows with a external PSC also on windows.  Both are running on a dedicated physical server outside of the vsphere vm environment.

If we move to 6.7, we can keep this setup until the move to 7.x, but if we try to move to the appliance (have to with 7.0) then we have a problem.  We do not want vcenter inside the environment it is managing.  We had a issues with it in the past and feel that the management server does not belong within the environment it is managing. 

With that being said we tried to migrate our test environment to the 7.0 appliance as a proof of concept, as we eventually have to merge the PSC now.  Upon trying to migrate 6.5 to 7.0 we ran into problems with the ESXi free stand-alone version.  It was our impression that vcenter appliance was able to run on the free version of ESXi (free license and all), but this now no longer seem to be the case.  The only other option for moving to 7.0 would be to purchase an additional ESXi license for a single ESXI host for the appliance to run on OR to do what we do not wish to do and that is for it to run inside the environment it is managing.

Has anyone run into this issues and found an alternate solution to this ?

Thanks

4 Replies
daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

We do not want vcenter inside the environment it is managing.  We had a issues with it in the past and feel that the management server does not belong within the environment it is managing.

This is now considered to be an outdated practice and can be perfectly fine to host the vCenter on ESXi hosts it manages. If it was not, for example, VxRail wouldn't exist. There are smart and not-so-smart ways to go about doing it, however. Using host groups for large clusters to ensure it's always on one of a few possible hosts, attaching it to an ephemeral virtual distributed port group (if applicable), and ensuing that there are no circular dependencies are the way to go. Your objective should be in getting to the vCSA as fast as possible; using Windows is totally pointless and robs you of valuable features you could otherwise use.

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Moderator: Thread moved to the vSphere Upgrade & Install area.


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jonastro
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Also note that If an ESXi host is licensed with the free version key, you cannot add it to vCenter Server or run/deploy vCenter VM on the ESXi.

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jburen
Expert
Expert

And even if it *was* possible, I would rather run VCSA inside a cluster with multiple hosts and HA than on a single host with no failover possibilities at all...

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