vCenter 5.5 - Is it part of your ESXi cluster?

[edrocks]

Trying to decide the best path for our upgrade...  right now we have vCenter 5.1 sitting on a separate physical box.  I do not like the idea of maintaining another server/hardware.  Also we may have a Metro cluster down the road so having the vCenter in the ESXi cluster would be good.

Many VM guys I've spoken with are running vCenter within the environment.

How about you?  Thoughts?  How are you handling redundancy now that vCenter Heartbeat will be going away?

[cjscol]

I've been deploying vCenter as a virtual server since about vSphere 4, prior to that I liked to have it as a physical server because I didn't like the idea of the management server sitting inside what it was managing.  I have not had an issue with running it as a virtual server on the cluster it is managing.

I simply rely on VMware vSphere HA for handing resilience.

If you are not on vSphere 5.5 update 2 then I suggest NOT upgrading the hardware version of your vCenter server to 10 as you will only be able to edit the settings of the VM using the vSphere Web Client and if the vCenter server is down then you cannot use the vSphere Web Client!  From vSphere 5.5 Update 2 you can edit a HW v10 VM using the C# client.

If you have a large infrastructure then you could consider implementing a "Management Cluster".  This could be a cluster containing just two hosts and run things such as vCenter, SQL server for vCenter, Windows Active Directory Domain Controllers, DNS, DHCP, vCenter Operations Manager, vMA, e.t.c.

[edrocks]

Thanks cjscol.

Do you have the option during a 5.5 U2 vCenter install to not be at HW version 10?

I have thought about a seperate mgt. cluster.

I know that running vCenter inside the virtual environment you still have dvswitch, HA copies on all hosts.  So that you can take down vCenter and still have those functions.

[cjscol]

Sorry for the late reply.

Upgrading vCenter to 5.5 u2 will not automatically upgrade the VM to HW 10.

[Cyberfed27]

We are still running our vCenter 5.5 install on a physical box. This is mainly because back when we first installed vCenter (version 3.5 days) VMware recommended it be on a physical box. At least that's what the VMware teacher told us. So we have been upgrading our physical vCenter box every time VMware releases updates. I agree that having to maintain another box just for vCenter is a burden. We are planning to migrate our vCenter to a VM in the very near future. Physical hardware just doesn't make sense anymore in my opinion.

[VRBitman]

I will add that VMware has made public how it will be possible to further protect a virtual vCenter with the help of other features in vSphere 6.0, which will go GA in the very near future.

Specifically, Fault Tolerance will support quad-core vCPUs, so we will finally be able to enable FT for VMs that require dual (such as vCenter) or quad core CPUs.

[edrocks]

So are you guys running the SQL server on the same VM as well?

Makes sense...  flexibility of vMotion etc.  And you are only dealing with a single VM for upgrades etc.  Not sure the remote DB will gain us anything at all.

And we plan on moving vCenter to the metro cluster at some point.