ESXI 5 and Vcenter

Ok I have been given the keys to our production ESXI environment at work at thought what better way to learn it then to build out a lab to play with. I have a few physical servers to play with in my lab and I have ESXI 5 up and running on a HP Proliant 380e. I was stumped on the part about being able to clone and make templates so I was watching the training videos and it said I needed Vcenter installed on a Server 2008 R2 box and enable NET 3.5 and allow NFS to create a share. My question is to the people who run esxi in a production setup, Do you run Vcenter on a physical server outside of esxi or is it ok to create it inside the esxi box. Seems kinda of a waste to have a big server buildout and still need another physical box to make vcenter work. What is the best practice here?

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TechGuy215

VMware KB: Running vCenter Server in a virtual machine

Essendon

VMware recommend you make your vCenter virtual for all the benefits that such a setup provides, High Availability and DRS to name a couple. Adding resources is a breeze too. Some organisations that require 100% availability of their vCenter keep it physical, by utilizing vCenter Heartbeat (think clustering, though it isnt really that). But yeah, most companies will have a virtual vCenter.

higherho

We have a hardware based vCenter server when I came in and we are slowly moving it off to virtual. We also have the DB used for vCenter actually in a HA setup but separate from the vCenter server itself. Though that is done on hardware but ever since the upgrade vSphere / vCenter 5.5 I am looking at making the application (the DB) HA clustered within the VM environment and free up a server or two.

jibbajabba

Just on downside when running vCenter in a virtual machine - if you got one host only and it also hosts the vCenter - you will not be able to use update manager to update the host as it is vCenter aware. You can still update the host manually of course ...

ElevenBravo

There's also a dedicated virtual appliance option that runs on Open SuSE and an external Oracle or embedded DB if you don't want to use Windows to host your vCenter. Some of the plugins aren't available with the appliance version however.

linuxabuser

No linked mode either with the vCSA.