Written by: Sean Wilson
Sunday, May 23, 2010 4:17 PM 

Here’s a conundrum – you are building a virtual infrastructure to host your businesses mission critical applications. Where do you put your vCenter Server? The documentation says it can be physical or virtual – but, be honest, do you really get a warm fuzzy feeling with the thought of managing your virtual infrastructure from a virtual machine hosted within that infrastructure?

OK – being perfectly honest my first reaction to this is “No way!”, but then rationality kicks in and I end up arguing with myself: “... but we have several hosts for redundancy and HA to failover VMs if there is a problem...”, then “... but what if we lose access to the vCenter, perhaps the clusters resources get saturated, then how do I fix the problem...”, and so on... On the one hand there is the ego telling you that if virtualisation is so wonderful then you should be able virtualise everything, and on the other you have caution presenting you with perfectly reasonable what-if scenarios.

This week I looked at a great solution, and the answer is yes you can virtualise vCenter Server safely, you just have to remember that you don’t have to virtualise it on the hosts you are managing. “What...”, I hear you ask, “...is the point of that then?”... Well, it’s not just about proving a point, there are some genuine benefits...

So the solution that was discussed was to use the free version of ESXi on its own single host to provide a virtual platform for hosting vCenter Server together with any complementary systems for managing the virtual platform. This gives you the best of all worlds:

1. Your management system is separated from the virtual infrastructure it controls
2. You gain the benefits of virtualisation for your management systems (e.g. ease of management, consolidation).
3. You gain the benefits of any infrastructure you have in place to support your virtual infrastructure (e.g centralised storage, consolidated backup, recovery management etc).
4. If your physical host fails you can bring up your virtualised vCenter Server on another host.
5. ESXi has a much lower attack surface than vSphere and so you can harden your management systems installation
6. And best of all it is free!

So with a little thought all the objections I could come up with for virtualising the management systems can be addressed by implementing a separate host scenario – and suddenly virtualising vCenter Server seems like a great idea!

For more information:

To find out more about Virtualisation – click here.

To download ESXi for free – click here.

To buy VMware vSphere – click here.

Or, just post your query, I’ll be watching...

Copyright ©2010 Sean Wilson

Trackback Print

Tags:

Categories: Virtualisation, Systems

Location: Blogs Sean Wilson