As organizations grow with their VMware vCenter deployment having possibly started out with the features found in the free edition of VMware ESXi, gaining access to the enterprise features and functionality in a vSphere environment requires deploying a VMware vCenter server. What is a VMware vCenter server? How is it deployed? What are some of the best practices in deploying it along with other considerations? Let’s take a look at the process of deploying a VMware vCenter server and consider the aforementioned questions/aspects of the product as we think about growing our VMware infrastructure in an enterprise.

What is a VMware vCenter Server?

VMware’s vCenter product is the core product required to turn on the enterprise features. This includes, but isn’t limited to the following:

• Centralized management including Single Sign On (SSO) authentication
• Centralized permissions management
• Centralized logging of tasks events
• Resource management
• Central location to perform management and administrative tasks across ESXi hosts
• High Availability
• Distributed Resource Scheduling
• Fault Tolerance
• Centralized updating via the update manager
• Provides the central functionality to unlock other VMware products including the vRealize suite of products, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), NSX network virtualization, and others.

While you can certainly spin up virtual machines with the free ESXi product, as you can see to gain access to the true enterprise features that most will want to utilize in their mission critical environments, the vCenter server is a requirement. Most, if not all other add-on products from VMware, require vCenter.

VMware vCenter Installation and Options

There are two options for deploying a vCenter server. It can be installed on a Windows Server either physical or virtual, or can be deployed by way of OVA Linux appliance inside the virtual environment itself. The appliance is known as the vCenter Server virtual appliance or VCSA as it is referred to in short most commonly. In the early days of vCenter, it was preferred to install it on a Windows server as this was at the time the better performing platform for vCenter. However, as time has moved on and development on the virtual appliance has taken off, now VMware is taking the stance of saying the VCSA appliance is just as robust as the Windows appliance. In fact, it has been noted that VMware exclusively uses the VCSA appliance internally for managing their virtual machine resources.

Also, keep in mind that since VMware seems to be leaning toward the appliance for future releases of vCenter, this may weigh in your decision to go that direction now so it will be less painful later if the Windows version goes end of life.

vCenter Server Virtual Appliance Deployment

Let’s take a look at deploying a typical vCenter Server Virtual Appliance VCSA in our virtual environment. The first thing we need to do is download the VCSA appliance which is in the form of an ISO and not an OVA file. We need to mount this ISO image to a Windows machine and deploy it with a web browser.