VMware vCenter Server

VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for managing your VMware vSphere environments, allowing you to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure with confidence.

Simple Deployment: Quickly and easily deploy vCenter Server using host profiles or a Linux-based virtual appliance.

Centralized Control and Visibility: Administer your entire vSphere infrastructure from a single location.

Proactive Optimisation: Allocate and optimise resources for maximum efficiency with vCenter Server.

Management: Use powerful tools to simplify management and extend your control, now including vRealize Log Insight.

VMware vCenter Server - Features

Current Features

Deployment Options

• vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)Quickly deploy vCenter Server and manage vSphere using a Linux-based virtual appliance.

Centralised Control and Visibility

• vSphere Web Client enables managing the essential functions of vSphere from any browser anywhere in the world.
• Inventory search puts the entire vCenter inventory including virtual machines, hosts, datastores, and networks at your fingertips from anywhere within vCenter.
• Storage maps and reports convey storage usage, connectivity and configuration. Customisable topology views give you visibility into storage infrastructure and assist in diagnosis and troubleshooting of storage issues.

Proactive Management

• Host Profiles standardise and simplify how you configure and manage ESXi host configurations. Capture the blueprint of a known, validated configuration - including networking, storage and security settings - and deploy it to many hosts, simplifying setup. Host profile policies can also monitor compliance.
• vCenter Single Sign-On. Simplify administration by allowing users to log-in once and then access all instances of vCenter Server without the need for further authentication.
• Dynamic allocation of resources. vSphere DRS continuously monitors utilisation across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines based on pre-defined rules that reflect business needs and changing priorities. The result is a self-managing, highly optimised and efficient IT environment with built-in load balancing.
• Automatic restart of virtual machines with vSphere HA. Provide an easy to use and cost-effective failover solution.
• Fine-grained access control. Secure the environment with configurable, tiered group definitions and fine-grained permissions.

A Scalable and Extensible Virtualisation Management Platform

• Improved large-scale management is possible with vCenter Server since it is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. vCenter Server is a 64-bit Windows application, providing substantial scalability improvements. A single instance of vCenter Server manages up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 running virtual machines, and with Linked Mode you can manage up to 30,000 virtual machines across 10 vCenter Server instances. VMware HA and DRS clusters can support up to 32 hosts and 3,000 VMs.
• Linked Mode provides a scalable architecture and visibility across multiple vCenter Server instances, with roles, permissions and licenses replicated across the infrastructure so you can simultaneously log in, view and search the inventories of all vCenter Servers.
• View the VMware vCenter Linked Mode Video.

VMware vCenter Server - System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter R2 & SP2 64bit
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter R2 & SP2 64bit
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter R2 SP1 64bit
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter R2 64bit
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter SP1 64bit

Supported Databases

• IBM DB2 9.7, 9.5
• SQL Server 2005 64-bit & 32-bit Standard, Enterprise SP4
• SQL Server 2008 64-bit Express R2
• SQL Server 2008 32-bit Standard, Enterprise R2
• SQL Server 2008 64-bit Standard, Enterprise R2
• SQL Server 2008 32-bit Standard, Enterprise SP2
• SQL Server 2008 64-bit Standard, Enterprise SP2
• Oracle 10g 32-bit Standard, Enterprise, One R2 (supported with version 10.2.0.3.0 or higher)
• Oracle 10g 64-bit Standard, Enterprise, One R2 (requires version 10.2.0.4)
• Oracle 11g 32-bit Standard, Enterprise, One R1
• Oracle 11g 64-bit Standard, Enterprise, One R1
• Oracle 11g 32-bit Standard, Enterprise, One R2
• Oracle 11g 64-bit Standard, Enterprise, One R2

Hardware Requirements

• Processor - Intel or AMD x86 processor with two or more logical cores, each with a speed of at least 2GHz. The Intel Itanium (IA64) processor is not supported. Processor requirements might be higher if the database runs on the same machine.
  
• Memory - 4GB RAM. RAM requirements may be higher if your database runs on the same machine. VMware VirtualCenter Management WebServices requires 512Mb to 4.4GB of additional memory. The maximum Webservices JVM memory can be specified during the installation depending on the inventory size.
  
• Disk storage - 4GB. Disk requirements may be higher if the vCenter Server database runs on the same machine. In vCenter Server 5.0, the default size for vCenter Server logs is 450MB, which is larger than in vCenter Server 4.x. Make sure the disk space allotted to the log folder is sufficient for this increase.
  
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express disk requirements - Up to 2GB free disk space to decompress the installation archive. Approximately 1.5GB of these files are deleted after the installation is complete.
  
• Networking - 1Gbit connection recommended.