Tuesday 29 May 2018

VMware vSphere 6.7 - vCenter Deployment Topologies

On a number of the VMware courses that I deliver we talk about the VMware vCenter product.

I generally talk about vCenter, but I should actually talk about vCenter and the Platform Services Controller or PSC. It's historical and age that means I talk about the combined services as the vCenter.

In Summary these two bits of software do two different sets of services.

Lets start with the PSC , the PSC provides the following services.

  • vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO)
  • VMware License Server
  • Lookup Service
  • VMware Certificate Authority (CA)
  • Certificate Store
  • VMware Directory Service
The vCenter component provides the following services.
  • vCenter Server
  • vSphere Web Client (server)
  • vSphere Update Manager (VUM)
  • VMware vSphere Auto Deploy
  • VMware vSphere ESXi Dump Collector
  • VMware vSphere Syslog Collector
These two distinct bits of software can be installed on one box (embedded mode), or split between boxes (distributed mode).

Fiedhlim O'Leary of VMware has produced a lightboard talking about the ways in which vCenter can be deployed and the considerations for both.