VMware Virtual Center – Physical or Virtual?

Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

Over the years there have been some controversy over this topic. Should Virtual Center (vCenter) be physical or virtual? There is the argument that it should be physical to ensure consistent management of the virtual environment. Of course there is also the fact that Virtual Center requires a good amount of resources to handle the logging and performance information.

I’m a big proponent for virtualizing Virtual Center. With the hardware available today there is no reason not to. Even in large environments that really tax the Virtual Center server you can just throw more resources at it.

Many companies are virtualizing mission critical application to leverage VMware HA to protect these applications. How is Virtual Center any different. So what do you do if Virtual Center crashes? How do you find and restart Virtual Center when DRS is enabled on the cluster?

You ave a few options here.

1. Override the DRS setting for the Virtual Center vm and set it to manual. Now you will always know where your virtual center server is if you need to resolve issues with it.
2. Utilize Powershell to track the location of your virtual machines. I wrote an article that included a simple script to do this which I will include on our downloads page for easy access.
3. Run an isolated 2 node ESX cluster for infrastructure machines.

So my last option warrants a little explaining. Why would you want to run a dedicated 2 node cluster just for infrastructure vms? The real question is why wouldn’t you? Think about it. Virtual Center is a small part of the equation. VC and your ESX hosts depend on DNS, NTP, AD, and other services. What happens if you loose DNS? You loose your ability to manage your ESX hosts through VC if you follow best practice and add them by FQDN. Now if AD goes down you have much larger issues, but if your AD domain controllers are virtual and you somehow loose them both that’s a problem. It’s a problem that could affect your ability to access Virtual Center. So why not build an isolated two node cluster that houses your infrastructure servers. You’ll always know where they will be, you can use affinity rules to keep servers that back each other up on separate hosts, and you can always have a cold spare available for Virtual Center.

Obviously this is not a good option for small environments, but if you have 10,30, 40, 80, 100 ESX hosts and upwards of a few hundred VM’s I believe this is not only a great design solution but a much needed one. If you are managing this many ESX hosts it’s important to know for sure where your essential infrastructure virtual machines reside that affect a large part of your environment if not all.