What is Virtual Center?
by VCP Help on 14/01/09 at 7:59 pm
VMware Virtual Center is a management tool that lets you administer one or more ESX hosts. When you are controlling multiple ESX hosts through VC, you gain access to many advanced features which are the key selling points of virtualization such as High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), and VMotion.
Imagine if you have a set of three ESX hosts, each running a few virtual machines. If one of the ESX hosts needs to be brought-down to add some RAM, you would open the Virtual Center interface and migrate the running VMs off of the host that needs work. Assuming you have shared storage such as iSCSI or a SAN, this can be done seamlessly without any interruption in access to the VM! Your users would never see the server drop offline. Imagine not having to schedule downtime for a virtual server with users — that’s what VMotion allows thanks to Virtual Center — and that’s just part of the story.
Virtual Center is run as a separate machine in addition to the ESX hosts. VC can be run in a virtual machine if desired, or you can run it on a standalone box. VC runs inside of Windows 2003 and will use a built-in version of MS SQL server or you can point it to a MS SQL server installation which is preferrable. Once VC is installed, you connect using the VI Client just as you would to an ESX host except that by connecting to the Virtual Center server, you can manage multiple hosts, VMotion, HA, and DRS.
If ESX is the engine of the Virtual Infrastructure “car”, Virtual Center is the driver’s seat with the controls and displays.
