An interesting conversation broke out on twitter with @lamw(William Lam), @ChrisWahl, @tomralph, & @bsmith9999(Brian Smith) that I thought I would bring over to the blog. There are a couple of items amongst the limitations that I was not completely clear on that I thought were critical to pass on.
The vCenter Server Appliance now includes most of the same functionality as vCenter however there are some real world limitations today that will still affect your decision to deploy.
From my perspective the first and main decision factor is going to be the size of the current environment and the potential growth at that site. This is because today there is a documented limit of 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines from a support perspective.
If you are running a VMware View environment you will also have to consider that you will need a separate Windows system anyways to run the View Composer service. Depending on your environment this may be a better ideas anyways.
Some other things you also need to consider when thinking of implementing the vCenter Server Appliance
- There is No linked mode – If you decide you want to deploy smaller pods of vCenters/hosts you cannot user linked mode to see them all at once.
- There is no support for MS SQL or a remote database other then Oracle at all for that matter. This brings us to the limit of 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines.
- No IPV6 usage directly, must reference hosts by DNS(which you should already be doing!)
- There also appears to be an exception for the ESXi Dump Collector, vSphere Syslog service, and Auto Deploy which must all use an IPv4 address. I have not personally tested this however.
What are you thoughts on deploying the vCenter Server Appliance today?