I currently have three VI3 datacenters in different geographical locations. They are fairly small with each environment having three or less hosts and less than 40 VM's. I now need to set up two new vSphere environments which again will be fairly small (4 or less hosts & less than 40 VM's each). As I will be updating the three VI3 enrironments to VSphere I would like to use vCenter linked mode to make administration a little easier across all 5 datacentres. I will have 5 x vCenter servers in total (one for each site).
My question is whether the bundled SQL Express will be adequate to deal with this setup. Obvioulsy if these were five stand alone environments then SQL Express would run okay but does the linked mode have additional overheads which would require a full version of SQL? I'd rather stick to Express to be honest as it's much easier to setup but I want to ensure it will be up to the job.