VMware vCenter, vSphere, vSAN EVALExperience - help with 6.0 setup

[Biren78]

Most of my ESXi knowledge is setting up single ESXi hosts then using the vSphere client to manage one by one. All-in-One storage, network appliances and that.

I did my VMUG Advantage and have EVALExperience. Now that 6.0 is out, I went to the page and it has vCenter 5. Is there going to be a 6?

Also - what order do I want to deploy this stuff in? ESXi first check. Then what? I'm not so interested in the Horizion stuff right now but I'd like to compare VMware to Prroxmox and Hyper-V.

I know I can take an exam prep for this but I really just want to give it a try.

 

[mrkrad]

yeah vcenter 6 is out! maybe you just didn't see the link properly! there is both a vm *nix version and a classic windows version. I suggest setting up a vcenter on a VM on a host that is not managed by that vcenter!

 

[whitey]

I can dig up the docs later but it is actually a VMware best practice to run your vCenter server 'as a VM' and has been for quite some time. With vSphere HA and now SMT vCPU Fault Tolerance the options for running highly available vCenter systems is fairly common practice. Now you certainly want to break out MGMT v.s. RSC clusters in the case of vCloud Director or Horizon but that's another topic. Long and short, vCenter running as a VM even under the hosts it is managing is a fairly safe config. You can pin that vCenter VM to a specific host with a DRS affinity rule (or disable DRS for that explicit VM) in the event that you do have some unforseen drastic/prolonged outage.

 

[Entz]

I did my VMUG Advantage and have EVALExperience. Now that 6.0 is out, I went to the page and it has vCenter 5. Is there going to be a 6?

v6 isn't listed on the EVAL Experience site yet. Not sure when but it will be (Rep said it is coming). In the meantime, you can get it directly from VMWare and use the eval/time limited licenses.

 

[T_Minus]

v6 isn't listed on the EVAL Experience site yet. Not sure when but it will be (Rep said it is coming). In the meantime, you can get it directly from VMWare and use the eval/time limited licenses.

I was told that too, except I didn't know we could get it direct and use our EVAL licenses! So glad I didn't play around with the older version yet.

Any chance you have a quick-URL to the direct download of 6.0 stuff?

 

[Entz]

Login - My VMware

Worth noting when I say EVAL liceness I don't mean the EVAL experience ones but the normal trial/time limited ones you get from VMWare (from installing).