Deploying a VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)
The vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) can be either downloaded as a single package (OVA); or the OVF, system disk, and data disk can be downloaded separately.
At the time of writing this book, the following were the names of the appliance files:
VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.5100-799730_OVF10.ova
Or
VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.5100-799730_OVF10.ovf
VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.5100-799730-system.vmdk
VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-5.1.0.5100-799730-data.vmdk
These names could possibly change when VMware releases the next update. I have included the file names only to give you a sense of what files have to be downloaded.
Tip
Before you deploy the appliance, create a DNS entry for the hostname that is given to the appliance.
How to do it...
In this recipe we will learn how to deploy the vCSA appliance in your infrastructure:
- In order to deploy the appliance you would need to use the Deploy OVF Template wizard using vSphere Client. Navigate to File | Deploy OVF Template, and browse to select the OVF file.
- The next screen will show you the summary of the appliance; notice the differences in the download size and the size on disk values. Click on Next to continue.
- On the next screen you will need to supply a display name for the appliance VM and click on Next to continue.
- Then, choose a datastore where you would like to place the appliance VM.
Once you highlight the datastore needed, click on Next to continue.
- The next screen will let you select the VMDK format. The default selection is Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed, because the second disk is thick provisioned. You can choose Thin Provision if you don't want to create a VMDK committing 85 GB disk usage.
- On the next screen, select the port group that the appliance's vNIC will be connected to. The port groups will be listed under the Destination Networks drop-down menu.
- Subsequent to this is the Ready to Complete screen, which will show you a summary of all configuration selections that you made during the wizard. Click on Finish at this screen to deploy.
How it works...
By default the appliance VM is configured to use two vCPUs, 8 GB of memory, and 2 VMDKs of sizes 25 GB and 60 GB.
The Linux version in the appliance is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 for VMware 11.1.1-1.4. The following is the screenshot from the postinstall.log file (/root/postinstall.log) showing the SLES version:
There's more...
If vCSA is configured to use the embedded database, then it cannot be used to manage more than 5 ESX servers or 50 virtual machines. This is because the embedded PostGreSQL database is sized that way. This limitation should not looked at as limitation with the vCSA. The default SQL Express database, which is included with the Windows-based vCenter, has the same limitation. The other limitations are:
- It cannot be configured to use MS SQL Server
- It does not support vCenter Linked Mode configuration
- It does not support the use of IPv6
Note
The embedded database used is PostGreSQL and can only be used as an embedded database.