vCenter Design question

benbuiltpc

At work we're running 3 instances of vSphere/vCenter 4.1 Essentials plus. We have 9 ESX boxes. With Essentials, you can only manage 3 hosts per vCenter. For vMotion purposes, we've recently grouped the servers by compatible processor types:

vCenter1:

ESX4,5,6

vCenter2:

ESX7,8,9

vCenter3:

ESX1,2,3

Yes, we are legitimate with licensing but kept adding boxes over the years. The challenge is arranging the vCenter VM's appropriately. Currently vCenter 1 and 2 run on ESX9, and vCenter 3 runs on ESX7. We have two sites connected via 50mb ethernet.

Our goal is to re-arrange the physical servers so we have six boxes at one site and 3 at the other (vCenter 1 and 2 at site A, vCenter 3 at site . But which hosts should run which vCenters, keeping the WAN factor in mind? Hope this makes sense...

dave330i

It sounds like you have 2 sites & 3 vCenter servers. Why? If you're worried about vMotion w/out enabling EVC, then create 2 clusters under 1 vCenter.

benbuiltpc

Licensing restrictions. Three separate instances of Essentials Plus allows only 3 hosts per cluster.

slinuxuzer

Keep vcenter in the same side of the wan as the ESX hosts it manages, check in to the cost to upgrade one of your Vcenter essentials, usually software vendors offer a upgrade license provided you have active support.

dave330i

benbuiltpc wrote: »

Licensing restrictions. Three separate instances of Essentials Plus allows only 3 hosts per cluster.

My bad. Didn't read the Essential Plus. vCenter should be part of the cluster it manages.

RTmarc

I'm curious. If you are big enough to have 9 host servers can you not afford proper licenses to for the environment? VMware has starter kits that are heavily discounted and can be purchased through a channel partner at an even lower price point.

Also, unless something has changed, vCenter doesn't play nicely with its managed hosts on less than a 1 Gbps connection. As someone else mentioned, keep the vCenter server with the hosts it manages.

meadIT

If you're running all 3 Essentials Plus kits at the same site, you're actually not in line with your licensing. You're only supposed to have one kit per site. When you needed to go above 3, you should have upgraded to Standard licensing. They have an upgrade path from an Essentials Plus to the Standard Acceleration kit (which includes vCenter Standard and 8 CPU licenses).