To Embed or not to embed PSC?

[juchestyle]

Hey Everyone,

We are getting ready to upgrade to vSphere 6 and a consultant was here before me and built a vcenter and a separate PSC.  I am questioning if we need to separate them?  Under what circumstances should the PSC be a separate virtual machine?

Thank you,

Matthew

[npadmani]

external PSC gives you easy scale out and PSC high availability options, where you deploy additional PSCs in the same SSO domain as your first PSC deployment.

Embedded installations are recommended for standalone environments in which there is only one vCenter Server and replication to another Platform Services Controller is not required. If there is a need to replicate with other Platform Services Controllers or there is more than one vCenter Single Sign-On enabled solution, deploying the Platform Services Controller(s) on separate virtual machine(s)—via external deployment—from vCenter Server is required.

Ref: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-vcenter-server6-deployment-guide.pdf

[paadams]

How large is your environment what are the design requirements?

If the environment is fairly small and HA is not a requirement of the design, you could use the embedded design to simplify the installation.  Also, if the staff isn't as knowledgeable an embedded PSC may be the way to go to simplify support and troubleshooting later.  With out knowing anything about your environment, I am inclined to make the recommendation to use an HA design but that doesn't fit everyone's requirements.  Read through the following links and decide which is best for your environment.

List of recommended topologies for VMware vSphere 6.0.x (2108548) | VMware KB

How to properly architect and deploy vCenter 6.0 - Jonathan McDonald - VMware Blogs

vSphere Datacenter Design – vCenter Architecture Changes in vSphere 6.0 – Part 2 - VMware Consulting...

Decision Tree

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2016/04/Decision-Tree-v1.pdf