VMware vCenter Server is the centralized management tool that allows for the management of multiple ESXi servers and virtual machines (VMs) through a single console application. vCenter is a critical component in the VMware deployment. Lot of the feature/functionality are not available without vCenter. All of the well-known features in vSphere such as VMotion, Storage VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), VMware High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance (FT) require vCenter Server.
In simplistic terms, VMware vCenter can be compared to Oracle’s Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control in the absence of Oracle VM in a physical server environments. For the DBAs who happen to be working on Oracle VM, vCenter is equivalent to Oracle VM Manager. At the time of writing this blog, the latest release of vCenter that was available was vCenter 5.1. News from the recent VMWorld conference, the next release of vCenter 5.5 will be available to the general public sometime in September 2013.
vCenter Server 5.1 provides a vCenter Server Simple Install option that installs vCenter Single Sign-On, Inventory Service, and vCenter Server for small VMware deployments on the virtual machine. If you prefer to customize the location and setup of each component, you can install the components separately by selecting the individual installation options in the following order:
- vCenter Single Sign-On
- Inventory Services
- vCenter Server
Each of the components listed above can be installed in a different virtual machine.
Click on the option to perform the VMware vCenter simple install which will install vCenter Server, Single Sign On Server, and Inventory Service on the Windows server.
Click on OK because the vCenter server is not connected to an Active Directory domain
Then click on Next from the Single Sign On screen
When the Welcome screen appears, click Next to continue.
Select Next to accept the End-User Patent Agreement.
Please read the License Agreement; If you agree to the terms, select “I accept to the terms in the license agreement” and click on Next
Enter the password for the vCenter Single-Sign-On Admin user account
Click on Next
For the test environment, you can accept to Install a local Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express instance
For a production environment, you should install an Oracle Database with Standard or Enterprise edition
Click on Next
Enter the password for the RSA_DBA and RSA_USER database account
Click on Next
Click on OK
Click on Next
Accept the default directory path to install VMware vCenter
You can change the location if your corporate standards dictate an alternate location
Click on Next
Accept the default HTTPS Port
Click on Next
Click on the Install button to start the installation of vCenter
If you are performing just an evaluation term, click on the next button
Enter the License key for vCenter and click on Next
For the ODBC data source for vCenter Server, we will accept the default of 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines in our test environment
Click on Next
Either enter the fully qualified host.domain name or enter the IP address
Click on Next
Accept the acknowledgement for using an IP address instead of a fully qualified host name.
Click on OK
Either accept the default port assignments or modify the ports as needed and defined in the firewall rules
Click on Next
Since this is a test vCenter deployment, we will accept the default JVM Memory allocation of 1GB and click on Next
Click on the Install button to continue
Click on the Finish button
Click on OK
Login as windows administrator: administrator / password to access vCenter from the vSphere client
