Advice: vcenter location - on stand alone host or in cluster.

[bevanbroun]

Hello

we are using vsphere 5.5 standard with vcenter appliance. We are running on HP servers with HP storage.

We have a two small esxi clusters - one of two hosts called "dmz" the other of 3 hosts called "core". There is stand alone esxi system not part of the cluster and planned not to be managed by vcenter.

I want vcenter to run on the "core" cluster  for higher availability of the service. HA, Vmotion to another host during hardware maintenance etc.

A colleague is uncomfortable running vcenter on a system that is managed by itself and want to run vcenter on the stand alone single host.

Im looking for validation that running vcenter in a cluster that is managed by itself is pretty normal and has benefits. Pointers to any best practice documents or standard configurations would be very useful.

Note: We do have a VMs in RHEL cluster with vmware fencing, ie cluster members are fenced by reboot via login to vcenter.

Thanks in advance

[BenLiebowitz]

Personally, I prefer my vCenter to be a VM, so it can be protected with HA in the event of a hardware failure.  If your vCenter is physical and there's a hardware event, your vCenter goes down.

Here are a few blog posts written on the subject...

http://vxpresss.blogspot.com/2012/09/vmware-vcenter-server-physical-vs.html

http://www.virten.net/2013/11/vcenter-and-the-physical-or-virtual-discussion-vsphere-5-5/

http://plain-virt.blogspot.com/2012/01/running-vcenter-as-vm-or-physical.html

In the end, the decision is yours... 

Ben Liebowitz, VCP

[bevanbroun]

to be clear

- it's not physical versus virtual vcenter.

- its vcenter in a cluster managed by the same vcenter versus vcenter on unmanaged esxi host.

[Vikas Shitole]

I would prefer to keep in cluster(if not, I would prefer to add that host to vCenter outside cluster). you would miss lot of features if placed in individual ESXi which is not managed by vCenter.

>If you want vMotion(DRS) and SVMotion(SDRS) to be controlled, you can override cluster level to "manual" or "partially manual"(applicable to DRS) for vCenter VM. (in case, if you want to avoid even very small impact due to vMotion etc).

>You can configure coll DRS/SDRS affinity rules if you want to keep this VM on particular host(s).

> There is NO reason to be uncomfortable, if vCenter VM itself fails, same impact if it unmanaged or managed. However, if managed by vCenter, HA will make it up and running after reboot.