In my opinion, there is only one reasonable explanation for Windows being the main platform for new vCenter installations: it’s that the vCenter Server Appliance is not well known yet!
What is the vCSA? A complete vCenter Server, packaged into a Linux appliance, including a one-click installation (… almost), no SQL license… It just sounds too good to be true!
Let’s be honest. There are still some limitations; using the integrated database, you can’t support more than 100 hosts (or 3000 VMs) – you can lift these limitations with an external Oracle database, but this tends to ruin the purpose of the appliance, in my opinion -. The appliance also lacks Linked Mode support. And finally, as any appliance, it comes with a kind of black box after-taste that could be a problem in some very standardized environments. These limitations probably leave the appliance out of question for most big environments. But for the vast majority of the others?
In many of these other cases, the vCSA is now the best choice for a production vCenter. If you want to give it a try, here are a few posts to help you with your first steps… And some more advanced settings as well!
Part 2 – Licensing and authentication
Part 3 – Disk space monitoring
Part 4 – Deploy CA-signed certificates
And if you go that far, you will have deserved to use the “one-click update” feature of the vCSA. Have a look here for your first update:
Update the vCenter Server Appliance 5.x
What do you think of the appliance?