Chapter 2. Working with the vCenter Database

This chapter will focus on the vCenter database. The last chapter showed you how to move from SQLExpress to the Full SQL Server. Now, let's review some common questions regarding items such as knowing the location of your database, troubleshooting growth, and other issues that keep an administrator up at night.

The vCenter Server uses a database for the storage and organization of information for the server. Each instance of vCenter Server needs to have its own dedicated database.

Note

As a note, VMware announced the end of availability of vCenter Server Heartbeat. Support for the product will end in September 2018. Administrators should leverage features such as vSphere High Availability along with other best practices to deploy vCenter Server with a management cluster.

The schema cannot be shared between instances of vCenter Server, although multiple databases of vCenter are allowed to exist on the same database server.