I've noticed that a lot of people run vCenter Server on a VM hosted on Vsphere / ESXi. This seems odd to me, because if there is an issue with the host then you will lose both the host and the management capabilities to switch hosts etc.
Should I provision a physical machine (eg. Microserver) to run VM management tools such as vCenter and Veeam or run them from a VM? What is best practice here?
EDIT: – I work in a SMB environment and almost exclusively use the VMware Essentials packs, so no more than 5 or so hosts, so setting up some sort of redundant or clustered vcenter setup is pretty much unrealistic
Best Answer
VMware best practice now is to install vCenter on a VM with HA. That's from a VMware training class when 5 originally came out. HA doesn't require vCenter to actually be working once set up, as the hosts know what to do.
I have Essentials Plus, use this setup, and can attest that it works well for us. Just make sure that you have enough capacity on your hosts to accommodate HA.