Laying the foundation for a vCenter deployment
VMware vCenter can be deployed as a Linux-based appliance or it can be installed on a machine running a supported version of Microsoft Windows. There are no real capacity or performance differentiators between both the deployment types. However, the Linux-based vCenter appliance does not support the use of an external Microsoft SQL database, owing to the fact that there are no supported Microsoft SQL drivers for Linux yet.
There is always a reason behind why an architect would choose either of the two deployment methods. Here, we will try to visit some of those aspects first before we delve deeper into the possible deployment models.
vCenter Appliance versus vCenter on Windows
We have categorized the design decisions into the following five categories:
- Ease of deployment
- Server management
- Choice of database
- Backup and recovery
- Cost of licensing
Ease of deployment
The vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) comes packaged with all the services required for the...
