Is VCSA available with VMWare vSphere Essentials Kit ?

[RonForger]

Hi,

As stated in this Blog Post, "vCenter Server for Windows" will be discontinued, and replaced by "vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)".

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/08/farewell-vcenter-server-windows.html

We currently own the "VMWare vSphere Essentials Kit", and have initially installed "vCenter Server for Windows".

We are wondering if and how our licence allow us to install "vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)".

Thank you very much for your help

[conyards · Accepted solution]

RonForger​ in short, yes - you can use the VCSA with the VMware vSphere Essential Kit. 

You should be able to download the VCSA for https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads.

There are also VMware provided migration tools, with rollback options, that can help you move from the windows based VC to the VCSA; https://virtual-simon.co.uk/vcenter-server-migration-tool/.

Thanks

Simon

[vasan22in]

Hello,

Yes, Windows vCenter is discontinued. I hope you aware Essential license kit and it's feature limitations. Refer the below document for windows vcenter to vcsa migration.

https://wn.com/how_to_migrate_windows_based_vcenter_to_vcsa_6.5  ..

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/Migrate-from-Windows-vCenter-to-vCenter-Server-Appliance-to-a...   ...

[pwolf]

There is only one problem with VCSA in an essentials environment.  You cannot run it physical - which makes update manager quite unusable in this scenario as there remains one host, which has to be updated manually. In a bigger environment with 2 VCSAs or vMotion this is no problem, but those solutions are strictly forbidden in the essentials license.

Vcenter on windows can run physical and can therefore be run on an independent piece of hardware. (This solution is perfect from a Vmware essentials perspective and I had it running for 3 years this way - but not from an economic perspective, if you start to caculate the cost of electric power per year for an additional piece of hardware)

Best solution would be, that Vmware allowed 2 VCSAs to run in the same small essentials context just for the pupose of having a running instance, if you have to do maintenance on one host running an instance of VCSA. I don't think, that this change in licensing would move any customer from Vsphere standard to essentials, it just would make life easier for administrators of small business environments.

Regards