I've been reading up on linked mode, but this only applies to the management on multiple clusters from a single vCenter via linking other vCenter's into it.
My question is – can you have two servers (say, the appliance, and a physical server seperate to the vSphere cluster) running vCenter managing the same cluster for redundancy?
Best Answer
No, you cannot have multiple vCenter servers managing the same hosts at the same time.
In KB1024051 the supported HA options for vCenter are outlined.
New in version 6.0 is the option to use Microsoft Clustering for the Windows version of vCenter which probably provides the best availability, but also introduces the highest possible complexity.