VMware VCenter Server: Basic Installation

We got our Licences from VMware this week; and the first cab of the ranks was installing VCenter Server. As with all VMware products the documentation was bountifully and the installation process was painless. After the recent P2V migration of our Amicus POS test lab equipment we have a few spare physical servers around the office, so we picked a medium specification server from the bunch to host the server install. During the planning phase we also decided to host the database for VCenter on a separate SQL server, rather than the default setup of a local SQL express installation. The default install utilising SQL express is recommended for environments containing less than 50 virtual machines spread over a maximum of 5 hosts, our testing environment alone almost exceeds this.

When installing VCenter Server, we created a domain account to run the VCenter service, this account was also given local administrator privileges on the host server. I also found it best to run through the entire VCenter install process whilst logging on as this service account, I also created the 32bit DSN using this account, as we where installing VCenter on a 64bit OS a 32bit DSN was created using “[WindowsDir]\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe”.