Controlling Workstation VMs from VCenter

[jenner43201]

My corporate environment uses ESXi to deploy VMs and VCenter to control them.  I happen to have a machine running Workstation Pro 12 with 4 VMs that we would like to control via VCenter.  How do I do that?

More details:

I have a machine configured as a file server running with a Linux OS on RAID 1 HDDs, with a RAID 5 partition functioning as a storage/file server.  I use NFS to connect the Linux OS to the NFS partition.  I have Workstation Pro 12 running on the Linux hosted system to deploy other OSs for code build purposes.  The VMs connect to the NFS mount through the host OS.  This configuration is the "odd man out", whereas our other VM environments run on ESXi and VCenter.  We would like a centralized location to run all our VMs through VCenter.

The OSs (host and guests) on the file server machine need to be re-imaged for security reasons.  This brings us 2 options:

1) Re-image host OS and continue the NFS mount.  Upgrade Workstation Pro, and use that to create VM environments on this machine.  Then, have VCenter connect to manage the VMs should anything go wrong.  This continues our "odd man out" situation, but we would be able to control the VMs via VCenter.  NFS partition would not need to be changed.

2) Install ESXi as the main OS on the machine, and create VMs for each required guest OS.  This allows us control from VCenter.  However, we aren't sure what would control the NFS partition.  In this configuration, our IT person suspects that the NFS partition may need to be reformatted to a VMWare standard.  I'm fuzzy on the details, so I apologize if this description is vague or incorrect.

Either option is good enough, we aren't sure how to to accomplish either option.

Thanks.

[techguy129 · Accepted solution]

You cannot management VM's running in workstation pro. vCenter can only manage ESXi hosts. However, you can do it the other way, manage vcenter with limited capabilities through Workstation Pro.

You will want to redeploy the host as ESXi.

Option two is your solution here. If the VMs are running off the local storage of the host (Raid 5), you will reformat that as a VMFS volume and place the VM disk (vmdk) there. From this point,  you can manage the esxi host by the local management web portal and/or vCenter.

[jenner43201]

OK, thank you.  The customer service person via chat mentioned that Vcenter can control Workstation VMs.  Apparently that person was incorrect.

The VMs will be stored on the RAID 1 system so that the RAID 5 storage is dedicated to file storage. I had hoped that we don't need to convert the NFS volume to VMFS.  I don't  know if this is possible.

I guess another option is to have the file server machine function as a regular file server, and then have another machine run the VMs.  I would need to find another machine to run the VMs.