Introduction
In this blogpost I’m going to walk you though the installation of vCenter 5.5 for Windows. My take on this is – if your relatively small shop with modest virtualization requirements the vCenter Server Appliance is the way to go. It’s dead easy to deploy and update. If your a large environment and you have a lot of third party tools that plug into vCenter, I think the Windows version is probably the safer bet…
VMware vCenter is the core management platform, and its common for other technologies both from VMware and third-parties to use it as the central point for accessing ESX hosts and clusters, as well accessing VMs and other components upon which they can add value or further orchestration. At the time of writing VMware support two version of vCenter – an installable version which runs on the Microsoft Windows platform and virtual appliance edition which runs on the SUSE Linux platform. In terms of their core APIs, the two editions are functionally the same. However, there are some features that are for the moment only available on the Windows editions. Historically, third-party add-ons have run as Windows plug-ins. Finally, whilst the scale of vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has increased in recent releases, it has lower configurable maximums. In production environments it is the Windows edition that predominates – and this is combination of history (the first version of vCenter was Windows only) and compatibility. With this said, the VCSA is considerably easier to deploy and update/upgrade than the Windows edition – and for this reason it might be more suitable for a small-medium sized deployment where ‘core” virtualization is all that is required. Currently, the features that are only supported by the Windows edition or require a Windows instance to function include:
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