VMware vCenter Appliance under Linux

I was playing around in my lab and figured I would give the vCenter Appliance (VCVA)  a try. I realize that today there are limitations when it comes to the vCenter Appliance and I wanted to list those to get them out in the open:

• No Update Manager
• No Linked-Mode
• No support for the VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance)
• Only support for Oracle as the external database
• Embedded database, DB2, only supports 5 hosts and 50 VMs
• No support for vCenter Heartbeat

Now that you’ve seen the limitations why would you even bother testing it? You will still need Windows if you are running VUM and you can only use Oracle for large environments… Those are probably the two biggest constraints for 80% of you reading this and I agree they are huge constraints. But I am not saying that you should go ahead and deploy this in production straight away, I do feel that the VCVA deserves to be tested as it is the way forward in my opinion! Why? Most importantly, it is very simple to implement… Seriously setting it up takes a couple of minutes. You just import the OVF, accept the EULA, select the correct database type and start the vCenter service. Without any hassle it also includes a Syslog Collector service, Autodeploy and the Webclient. But that’s not all… If you look at it from a strategic perspective this is the first step. A first step towards a possible distributed vCenter solution, and I know some of you have been waiting on that for a while, so why not get your hands dirty straight away and start testing it.

--> Another interesting article on the website : http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/08/10/vcenter-appliance/ 

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/08/10/vcenter-appliance/