VCenter requirements

Zaits

Hello Everyone,

I was wondering if some of you might be able to share your experiences with how big your SQL database can get with VCenter. Do you guys virtualize Vcenter or have it on it's own pizza box ? Do you build redunancy for it ? We have a proof of concept coming up in a few weeks to benchmark two products against VMware and I don't want to handy cap Vmware by using SQL Express for this demo.

Thanks,

Zaits

jibbajabba

We started using a physical server has vcenter because we didn't know better
VMWare even recoomends using a virtual machine instead, this way you even have your VCenter covered by HA / DRS (if you run it in your environment).

Whether you build the VM redundant (in an HA / DRS cluster) is up to you. HA for example would still work in case your VC is down for some reason as it is running as agent on each individual header.

In Vi3 though the virtual center also included a license server so in case the virtual center is down your cluster would become unlicensed, that however is not an issue either actually because you always have a grace period of 60 days and that is enough time to fix either, physical server or virtual server.

As for the database - you can use any edition of SQL Server. In my test environment I am using an existing database server which is used to run several websites and simply created a DSN - works like a charm.

As for the database size, vmware published a sizing calculator once :

http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vc_db_calculator.xls

I am not sure if this has been updated for vSPhere just yet but you can also just your VI Client in order to estimate a database size



(googled that screenshot as I have some VPN trouble at the moment and therefore cannot grab a screenshot from my cluster)