VMware has decided to not depend on any big player in the virtualization market.The main intention is that vmware don’t want others to steal their innovation,ideas and their robust technologies. In last VMworld conference also they haven’t invite Microsoft and citrix. Currently most of vcenter servers are running on Microsoft windows 2008 servers . This creates heavy dependencies on microsoft products. So VMware studio has customized the SUSE linux and they are providing the Vcenter appliance to remove the Vcenter Server for windows.
vCenter appliance can be easily deploy as virtual machine under ESXi host and can manage the ESXi servers. Vcenter appliance also provide the webinterface to manage the vcenter stuffs . It also provides option to upgrade and update vCenter appliance from vmware automatically .By default it comes along with embedded database(PostgreSQL) to configure the vCenter .It also provides option to use oracle database.
Here we will see how to deploy the vCenter appliance 5.5 on ESXi 5.5 server and how to configure it.Download the vCenter appliance from VMware. (Trial version will work for 60days)
1.Connect to VMware ESXi 5.5 server using vSphere client.
2.After login ,just click on file and select deploy OVF template.
3.Provide the complete path of vCenter appliance OVA file which you have already downloaded from VMware.
- Source for Vcenter Appliance OVA file
4.You will get the appliance details like the below one.This will help to you choose the provision type.
5.Enter the Vcenter Appliance name and click net to continue.
6.Select the provisioning type.Thick provision will take almost 125GB .So let me go with thin provisioning .
7.You will get the summary of options which you have provided. You can also select automatic power on after the deployment. If you don;t have enough system resources, do not select power on after deployment . You can reduce the memory and number cpu’s after the deployment of vcenter appliance by editing the virtual machine.
You will get a small window like the below to show the deployment status.
8. We have successfully deployed the VMware vCenter Appliance 5.5 on ESXi 5.5 host.
In the next page we will see how to configure the vCenter appliance.(click 2 )
1.Open the browser and enter the URL which you have seen the vCenter appliance console .(Ex:https://192.168.2.7:5480).The default vCenter appliance’s user name is root and password is “vmware”
2.You need to accept the end user license agreement to continue further.
3.Here i have selected the default configuration which is the easy way to finish . But You need to select the customized option on real production environments. The default option will select the embedded database and it will start configure automatically.
4.After the auto configure, you will be redirected to the summary screen. If you want to re-configure the vcenter appliance , You can click on launch button which is under utilities–>Setup wizard.
5.Start the vSphere Web Client services.This will take more than 5 minutes to initialize. Be patient .You will get message in web browser like “vSphere Web-Client is initializing ” if you access immediately. (Ex:https://192.168.2.7:9443)
You can login to web-client using vCenter appliance credentials. You can also connect the vCenter appliance using the vSphere client.Hope this article is informative about the vCenter appliance.