For those that attended VMworld 2013, and caught one of the vCenter Upgrade sessions, the focus on development this year was around usability rather than new features. Along that line, it's now recommended that 95% of vCenter installations are performed using the "Simple Install" method. It's shocking to me too, but their script ties everything together as neatly as possible. VMware also recommends keeping all vCenter services on the same box unless you have a VERY good reason to separate them (think single SSO instance for multiple sites); hence the Simple Installation.
In addition, recommended resource allocations looks like this:
- 2 x vCPUs
- 12 GB Memory (plus memory for SQL is local)
- 100 GB disk (plus 120GB for VUM)
- >= 1Gbps Nic
SSO
- 1 x vCPU
- 3 GB Memory
- 2 GB disk (how you would get an OS on this is a mystery to me)
- 1 x vCPU
- 2 GB Memory
- 2 GB disk
- 1 x vCPU
- 8 GB Memory
- 32 GB disk
- 4 x vCPUs (They assume that separating means larger environment)
- 8 GB Memory
- 100 GB disk
Caveats of vCenter on Windows Server 2012 R2:
- .Net 3.5 may be required if using SQL 2008 R2. To install .Net 3.5 on Server 2012, you have to specify the following install source from a Windows 2008 R2 install disk:
- disk:\sources\sxs
- vCenter Server install will hang at "Installing Directory Service" because it's trying to install ADAM which is no longer included with Windows Server. In order to allow the installation to complete, copy "ocsetup.exe" from a Windows machine version Vista or higher to the system32 directory of the Server 2012 R2 server PRIOR to starting the installation.
When vCenter and SSO are on a Win2012 (including R2) that are authenticating to a 2012 AD, domain users will see:
Cannot Parse Group Information
Check out the VMware KB article for the resolution:
That's what I have so far. If you find this post useful, drop a comment.
