hi.
One of our customer has a 3 hosts cluster with the Essentials license, which means no vMotion. They have vSphere client running as a VM inside the cluster. Now they need to do maintenance on the host running the VM, so they need to shut it down, move to another host, start it again. But if they shut it down then they won't be able to do all the other tasks 🙂
How is this case managed? I thought two possible ways:
1) stop the VM, deregister it on the running host and register on a new one.
2) create a clone of the VM on a second host, shut down the main one and manage the cluster with the clone during the maintenance
For both I found downsides.
For 1 I've read "registering and deregistering VMs outside vCenter can cause problems".
For 2 my though: what happens when I start the original VM again? Things might have changed since when it was shut down, will it down just sync from hosts or impose its configuration, possibly screwing up things?
thanks
Also running Essentials license. Never had issues with choice 2). When starting the original vCenter again, it will update the informations of the host, by refreshing/re-syncing.
Thank you very much for the feedback.
I ended up using solution #2 as well, but now I'm using the "clone" as live vCenter.