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I’ve been meaning to write this post for ages and its been gnawing at my brain for months begging to be written so grab a big cuppa and settle down for a long one!

vCenter in my opinion is now the major weakness in VMware’s software lineup.  Unfortunately it is that big fat single point of failure that just doesn’t cut it any more in terms of availability.

Lets think back to when VirtualCenter as it was then called was unleashed on the world in 2003.

At the time it was the wonder application that connected your ESX servers together allowing the game changer that was VMotion. You could easily provision VMs from templates, monitor your hosts and VMs and generate alerts.  The VMware SDK was what allowed the building of PowerCLI, one of the best powershell examples out there.  The VMware management layer was born.

Since then Virtual Center became vCenter and until probably some time last year this was all good. It was a great single pane of glass to look at and manage your virtual environment, hosts, clusters, resource groups, DRS, vMotion, HA etc.

It didn’t need to be highly available.  If vCenter went down vMotion and DRS would be affected and you wouldn’t be able to provision new VMs but your underlying VMs running on the hosts would not be affected.  HA was configured in vCenter but the information was held on the hosts so even if vCenter failed HA would still be able to recover VMs in the event of a host failure.

Now the situation is very different, there are more and more VMware management products that rely on vCenter.  Have a look at the VMware Management Products picture in the VMware Virtualization and Cloud Management solutions overview.

That’s a lot of applications that now rely on vCenter and this doesn’t even cover everything.

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