Vcenter virtualiztion options

[ranchodenieve]

I am very new to this, but have worked with vSphere in a virtual environment. I am building a Vsphere lab to experiment with and I need advice on the best way to virtualize Vcenter. I will be using a ProLiant DL380 G6 as my primary ESXi host and an Intel 9550 based system to use as another ESXi host with a FreeNAS server configured as iSCSI. I also have two Cisco 3550-12T switches which are layer 3 switches with advanced routing.

I have Windows Server 2008 r2, 2012 r2 and Windows 10 to work with as the operating systems on my vSphere server machine. It is an i5 4 core based machine. I could use HyperV or VMware workstation 12 as the virtual host for vCenter. I am leaning towards workstation 12, but I am unsure which operating system to use. What is the best combination to use to virtualize vCenter.

Or should I just use the vCenter appliance on the ProLiant box?

Bill

[vHaridas]

If you are using ESXi then you don't need VMware workstation or Hyper-V

Install ESXi on Physical server and then deploy VMware vCenter Appliance on one of the ESXi Host.

You need one more Windows System to connect to ESXi host to deploy vCenter and connect to ESXi or vCenter system using web client or vSphere Client.

See how to Install VMware vCenter Appliance - Virtual Admin: Install VMware vCenter Server Appliance

Once you have ESXi ready then Add ESXi host in vCenter server.

Setup FreeNAS storage and attach it to ESXi Host.

Create Virtual Machines as needed, setup Virtual or dvSwitches....etc

Thanks,

Haridas

Virtual Admin

[ranchodenieve]

I probably didn't explain my reasoning for considering to run vcenter on a virtual machine well enough.

All 3 of the machines have sufficient memory and CPU cores to meet ESXi hardware requirements, but I have only one machine which meets the physical  CPU number requirement for vCenter. This is the ProLiant which I wanted to use as my primary ESXi host. Thus I was considering using one of the single CPU machines to build a virtual machine to run vCenter. Since it is a test environment rather than completely "production", I don't suppose that using the vCenter appliance rather than having a separate vCenter server would be a bad choice. This would free up the other machines to use as hosts. But I was also trying to understand the best practices if I were to try to run vCenter on a virtual machine.

Bill

[Nick_Andreev]

Using vCenter server appliance is absolutely fine. It's actually the preferred approach starting from vSphere 6. We just can't understand what you need the VMware Workstation for if all three servers have ESXi installed and can run VMs natively.