Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vCenter Appliance

· ·

I was playing around in my lab and figured I would give the vCenter Appliance (VCVA)  a try. I realize that today there are limitations when it comes to the vCenter Appliance and I wanted to list those to get them out in the open:

  • No Update Manager
  • No Linked-Mode
  • No support for the VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance)
  • Only support for Oracle as the external database
  • With the embedded database it supports 5 hosts and 50 VMs
    • vSphere 5.0 embedded database uses DB2
    • vSphere 5.0 Update 1 and higher uses vPostgres
  • No support for vCenter Heartbeat

Now that you’ve seen the limitations why would you even bother testing it? You will still need Windows if you are running VUM and you can only use Oracle for large environments… Those are probably the two biggest constraints for 80% of you reading this and I agree they are huge constraints. But I am not saying that you should go ahead and deploy this in production straight away, I do feel that the VCVA deserves to be tested as it is the way forward in my opinion! Why? Most importantly, it is very simple to implement… Seriously setting it up takes a couple of minutes. You just import the OVF, accept the EULA, select the correct database type and start the vCenter service. Without any hassle it also includes the following services:

  • vSphere Web Client
  • vCenter Single Sign On (SSO)
  • vSphere Auto Deploy Server
  • ESXi Dump Collector
  • Inventory Service
  • Syslog Collector

But that’s not all… If you look at it from a strategic perspective this is the first step. A first step towards a possible distributed vCenter solution, and I know some of you have been waiting on that for a while, so why not get your hands dirty straight away and start testing it.

If you want to know how to deploy the vCenter 5.1 Appliance I highly recommend reading this article.

**info updated – 1st of february 2013**

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. I don’t think those limitations are going to be an issue for SMBs like a majority of my customers so I can’t wait to give it a try. Hopefully, it is well received and they continue to add features going forward for the Fortune 500 crowd.

  2. If no Update Manager it seems a waste of time since how will we update/upgrade our hosts when patches etc. come out??

    This is a big step BACKward IMNSHO — VMware hates getting their hands dirty with SMB business and they overcharge for everything and they still want our business…????

    Still hope other companies eat VMware for breakfast in the SMB arena, they need to shrink their collective heads a little bit. 🙂 🙂

    And HOW many SMBs can afford an Oracle database much less learn Oracle?? Double dumb IMO. 🙂 🙂 mySQL or PostgreSQL would have been far better choices 1,000 times over.

    We still must waste time/money for a Windows license for vCenter 5, sigh…

    • My bad, I missed the DB2 part, still mySQL or PostgreSQL would have been better, then possibly no host/VM limits.

      • Ack pfft, I missed the DB2 line as well. Alright, consider my complaint dialed back a notch,

  3. Duncan, I wouldn’t say the embedded DB2 (5 host / 50 VM) is a limitation, this is no different to the embedded MSSQL Express on the installable vCenter. This is a soft limit geared for satisfactory performance when both vCenter and DB are local.

    • It is the supported limitation. 50 VMs is fairly low though and would only work in small test environment or small SMB. It is workable I agree but still a constraint to keep in mind, and yes that also applies to the Express database.

      • Are both the 5 hosts and 50 VMs a support limit?

        For the database size itself, could I have 3 hosts and 75 VMs instead, or are both numbers hard coded?

  4. We’re a small shop and the requirement for Oracle seems completely arbitrary to me. Why can’t they support MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, MSSQL etc? Why only Oracle??

      • Other DBs — in time for vSphere 6, to be announced in 2013?? 🙂 🙂

        I will remain skeptical of this whole thing for a LONG time. 🙂 🙂

  6. While not directly related to the appliance, this does bring up a question I’ve been pondering. Duncan, do you know if vSphere 5 changes the story for virtualized vCenters? (maybe the subject of a blog post?)

    In particular, two of the major limitations I see for a virtualized vCenter in 4.x are:

    1) A vCenter VM can’t vMotion itself
    2) VUM can’t/won’t update an ESX server hosting itself or its vCenter

    • I don’t think either of those limitations exist in 4.x.

      A vCenter VM can vMotion. I have heard of vCenter dropping out when vMotioning, on slow storage, but vCenter definitely can vMotion.

      I haven’t heard of any VUM issues with a virtual vCenter.

      • Our vcenter VM happily vmotions and I haven’t seen any issues with VUM either (running 4.1). When patching a host it should be in maintenance mode anyway so technically the host won’t have any VMs on it anyway.

        • Most of my experience is with VUM 4.0. In that case, if my VUM VM was on a host and I told it to remediate the host, it wouldn’t do anything. If I told it to remediate a different host, it’d put that host into maintenance mode and do the remediation as normal. This really comes into play when I tell it to remediate an entire cluster. Every host in the cluster would be patched, except for the host running VUM. Perhaps it is fixed in 4.1.

    • 4.1 fixed those issues with VUM from memory. It wasn’t that vCenter could never vMotion itself it was that the host wouldn’t re-mediate if vCenter or the VUM vm’s resided on it. It wasn’t a big deal, it’s not hard to manually move 2 vm’s.

      With respect to the other statements, It’s a 1.0 product, we know it has limitations which will be most likely worked around in future versions as Duncan says. Take it for what it is now, it will only work in smallish lab environments but that’s fine by me for the time being. I’ve moved on!

  7. Does vCenter Appliance have size limitation?
    SQL Express’s 4GB DB limitation always annoys me, when testing products which requires modification of vCenter logging depth. (eg. Chargeback)

    If vCenter Appliance has no such limitation, it would be suitable for testing.

    • DB2 Expresses limitation is it will only use 2 CPUs and 2GB of RAM on the host it’s running but does not have a limitation on overall DB size.

  8. An other important issue I see is the lack of Linked-Mode, in combination with vRAM entiletments.
    With multiple vCenter Appliance, vRAM pools can not be shared across multiple vCenter appliance instances since the do not support Linked-Mode

    • Hi Raimes,

      Yes you can upload the files to /etc/vmware-vpx/sysprep on the vCVA appliance.

      Mark.

  10. I am surprised at the lack of support for VSA. This vcenter virtual appliance is clearly focused on small business, as is VSA… so why wouldn’t the two be compatible?

    Sounds like the two engineering groups weren’t talking to each other.

    Also, as other people have said, the 50 VM limit seems rather arbitrary and low.

    I can only assume that future releases will remove these limitations.

    • The vSA was interesting and surprising to me as well. Here we have an SMB vSAN appliance and can’t use with our SMB vCenter. On the other hand, these are both 1.0 products and VMware has always been responsive add features/integration in furture releases.

  11. I wonder how you can say the vSA is an “SMB” product … have you looked at the price of vSA? For that price, a SMB customer can buy an entire SAN today!

    If you don’t believe: IBM DS3500 with a bunch of disks and SAS host connections and a few SAS HBAs are cheaper than a vSA – for which you would still need the physicals disks and probably a few more, since it does RAID1 and not RAID5 or RAID6 like the DS3500.

    Given the price of the vSA I wonder if there is ANYONE who makes sense as a customer for it. IMO the vSA would only make sense if it were given away free with the Essentials kits, for example.

  12. According to VM Ware Documentation:

    pg. 43 vCenter host / mnagement guide

    embedded Use the embedded database. This option is available only for a small
    inventory size, with fewer than 100 hosts and 1000 virtual machines.

    So it’s NOT limited to 5 hosts, its 100 and 1000 VM’s

  13. I can’t seem to set up a split network configuration (vManagement Network/LAN). I added a second NIC but it does not show up in the web interface. Anyone knows if this is supported at all?

  15. I just finished “vSphere5 What’s new” course and the
    Hosts/VM’s are limited only with amount of Ram !!

    Ram / Hosts / VMs
    8GB / 10-100 / 100-1000
    13GB / 100-400 / 1000-4000
    17GB / >400 / >4000

  17. These numbers are misleading. The VMware documents are being corrected and will display the vCenter Appliance with the embedded database, will support up to 5 hosts or 50 VMs and no more. This is a soft limit but performance will greatly be impacted if you were to use higher numbers which will not be supported

    Justin

  18. I have been testing vCenter appliance for a month now using the embedded database, two vSphere 5.0 hosts and over a dozen VMs. I like the quick deployment, the web-based management and stability. The vCenter appliance can be seamlessly vmotioned between hosts without any issues.

    In addition, new features like Storage I/O control are easily configured.

    Overall a good product but the question remains: would organizations consider deploying the appliance in production?

    • I think so if they were going for what like Duncan was saying about a distributed platform and SMB. For larger enterprises its an easy no with these limitations in place. I wouldn’t consider it but for small remote office deployments of 3 esxi host. EVEN then not being able to VSA may null the benefit of those remote locations unless you take something HP left-hand or openfiler… anyways.

  19. You can use update manager but you will need to install it on a win box and point it to the vcenter app. what i did was took my sql box we have added update manager and pointed it. so far so good.

    what is the limmit on the host as i am loving this as my windows admins cant patch it or fudge with it.

    • I read all the comments to see if anyone pointed this out. Cookie for you Cutch69.

      Of course you can run Update Mgr standalone.

  21. Duncan, Is there any public roadmap for the vcenter? We are considering to activate vCenter HB but cant see clear signs of vcenter will remain like it is, or will it change to vSA, what would make HB useless…
    We have tested the appliance and excited to see more features in later versions. It is definetly a step forward!

    • There’s no public roadmap available. I think the Appliance is the way forward, but that is my opinion and not necessarily VMware’s strategic direction.

      • Hi Duncan, do you recommend this for an environment having 3000+ Vms? with Oracle db? would patching be an issue without update manager?
        Cheers
        Mirza

  22. The appliance is a long time overdue component and is only in first release ..I certainly would not place this in an enterprise environment just yet !
    Speed is awesome though and it just works.. like most *nix implementations.
    SO many important limitations at this stage though..seems like dev were under pressure and also imagine not supporting the VSA in some way or another.
    I also still do not understand why the company want to kill all their SMB support and customers by making it so expensive instead of making it cheaper which will catch a bigger market.
    Who wouldn’t pay 10 bucks for the best virtualization product on the planet!
    vmware ..go back and rethink and side with the people again ..we are missing you !

  23. What is the limit to vcenter server essential license plus for SMB?

    How about HA, does it mean it will not work since – No support for vCenter Heartbeat ???

  25. A question to the 5.0 Update 1.
    I tried to install UpdateManager 5.0 Update 1. But when adding the IP address of VCenter appliance I got an error message.
    Is Update 1 (especially ESXi update) not usable with the not updated appliance?

  26. vCenter 5.0 Linux appliance will not update from VUM for whatever reason. Didn’t want to waist anymore time in the lab trying to get baseline configured for VEndpoint Protection testing. vCenter 5.0 Linux appliance is a good “first go”, but I will tell you right now. For seasoned VMware Admins. It’s a straight up, don’t use it right now product. Wait until 6.0 goodness is released. Appliance is a little buggy also. I had all manner of weird behavior initially. I got everything ironed out and working flawlessly, but the VUM issue got the Linux appliance the permanent boot until the next full version release.

  27. I have used the vCentre appliance to manage a two host, 650+ VM system with no issues what-so-ever. HA worked. DRS worked. Linked-clones worked. In fact, everything I tried worked. The only issue I had was the database transaction logs became full and prevented me from connecting to vCentre. The error I saw in the vmware-vpxd.log was:

    “vpxd failed to initiate”

    I resolved this by connecting to the vCentre appliance via ssh and issuing the following commands:

    # service vmware-vpxd stop
    # su db2inst1
    > db2 connect to vcdb
    > db2 update db CGF FOR VCDB USING logprimary 16 logsecond 112 logfilsiz 8192
    > exit
    # service vmware-vpxd start

  28. The vCentre Management guide quite clearly says that the embedded DB2 database is good for upto 5 hosts and 50 VMs. Yes, the smallest setting you can select for the database in the vCentre web config page is “small” (fewer than 100 hosts and 1000 virtual machines), but that doesn’t mean they are saying it will support that many. I think you’ll find that as far as VMware are concerned the smaller limit applies, i.e. 5 & 50.

    Having said that, it can cope with more than 600 VM in my experience.

  29. I finally tested this out in my lab today. Deployment was very quick and easy to setup. Since there is no support for update manger how do you go about applying updates. Other than that snafu I believe it is a great product going forward. Can’t wait to see what’s coming up for vCenter appliance. Perfect for SMB.

  30. Information reported below is from:
    http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2005086

    Minimum requirements for the VMware vCenter Server 5.x Appliance

    The VMware vCenter Server Appliance can be deployed only on hosts that are running ESX/ESXi 4.x or later.

    Component Requirement
    Disk storage on the host machine At least 7 GB
    A maximum of 80 GB

    Memory in the vCenter Server Appliance Very small inventory (10 or fewer hosts, 100 or fewer virtual machines): at least 4 GB
    Small inventory (10-100 hosts or 100-1000 virtual machines): at least 8 GB
    Medium inventory (100-400 hosts or 1000-4000 virtual machines): at least 13 GB
    Large inventory (More than 400 hosts or 4000 virtual machines): at least 17 GB

    As you can see from this document dated 6-12-2012, statistics and documentation gets updated as results/findings are reported. The vCenter Appliance is able to handle more hosts/vms with more RAM no matter what was originally provided in the documentation.

  31. While the above is true, it is only if you use an external database with the vCenter Appliance.

    Below is quoted from the VMware KB article at http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2005086

    Additional Notes:The embedded database provided with the vCenter Server Appliance supports an inventory with a maximum of 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines. The embedded database is not configured to manage an inventory that contains more than 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines. If you use the embedded database with the vCenter Server Appliance, exceeding these limits can cause numerous problems, including causing vCenter Server to stop responding. For related information, see the VMware vSphere 5.0 Release Notes.

  32. Seen the VSA running around 15 hosts and 150 VM’s in a production environment (not my idea)…Was working fine.

  33. With the announcement of new versions of vCSA and vSA at VMworld 2012 is there still the restriction that vCSA cannot manage vSA?

  34. vCenter Appliance Setup- when trying to start the embedded database i get an error that says “Failed to connect to database”.
    How do i fix this?

  35. Hi All, i was able to sort this out. The problem was that I did an update to 5.0.0.5480-804279 even before configuring the appliance to work. what i did was to import the appliance afresh (5.0.0.3324-472350), set it up up successfully before upgrading and it just worked.
    Cheers

  36. I heard this past week – vCenter Linux appliance 5.1 will be doing away with DB2 and replacing it with postgreSQL. Perhaps that will increase its utility beyond 5 hosts and 50 VM’s, but that’s just an assumption. Still no support for external databases other than Oracle.

  37. For Michael,

    Is there not any other solution ? Because my appliance has to be installed on a host server and it is very slow.

  38. Do any of these limitation exist with vsphere 5.1. appliance. What about with no AD? \
    •No Update Manager
    •No Linked-Mode
    •No support for the VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance)
    •No support for vCenter Heartbeat

  39. I run esx in a home lab. If VMWARE want people to learn and understand their technology running a bare metal free esx plus the appliance is a great combination. Personally I would mind a appliance for one esx host for free just for learning/testing.