I am planning an upgrade and overall architecture change in my environment and requesting the experience and knowledge of other skilled admins to make sure my thoughts and design makes sense.
Here is what I have today:
vCenter 5 on Windows 2K8R2 supporting my server environment ("VC1", 600 VM's, 29 hosts all ESXi 4.1u1)
vCenter 5 on Windows 2K8R2 supporting my View 5.2 VDI environment ("VC2", 150 VM's, 5 hosts all ESXi 5.0)
SQL 2008 on Windows 2K8R2 housing the SQL databases for both of the above ("DB1", vCenter, View and Upgrade Manager databases)
Overall design is simple: no linked mode, hefty host hardware, SAN, etc.
What I wish to accomplish:
1) For a number of reasons, I do not want to have more on "DB1" than is already there
2) I want to get all the components up to latest versions (View 5.2 was upgraded from 5.1, this being the first step in this long process)
3) Make sure I have an upgrade path in the future
What I have come up with:
1) Implement the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) ("SSO1") to run SSO using the embedded database, web client and the log collector functions; the built-in vCenter and Inventory service will be disabled; basic SSO deployment
2) vCenter and associated Inventory Services will still run on "VC1" and "VC2"
3) Both vCenters (and any future ones) will be registered with "SSO1"; result is a single pane of glass across the enterprise and a single web site to connect to
4) "DB1" will still house the SQL databases for View and the vCenters
My logic:
1) SSO as a function is common across vCenters
2) The database requirement for SSO is small enough that the embedded DB is quite sufficient
3) SQL is still used for the "large" databases
4) It appears that VMware is moving towards an all-appliance model for the server components of their products; this design is a step towards leveraging that trend
So, thoughts? Questions? Comments? All are appreciated.