Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Installing and Confi guring vCenter
Server
In the majority of today's information systems, the client-server architecture is king. This stand-
ing is because the client-server architecture can centralize resource management and give end
users and client systems simplii ed access to those resources. Information systems used to exist
in a l at, peer-to-peer model, when user accounts were required on every system where resource
access was needed and when signii cant administrative overhead was needed simply to make
things work. That is how managing a large infrastructure with many ESXi hosts feels without
vCenter Server. vCenter Server brings the advantages of the client-server architecture to the
ESXi host and to VM management.
In this chapter, you will learn to
Understand the components and role of vCenter Server
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Plan a vCenter Server deployment
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Install and coni gure a vCenter Server database
Install and coni gure the Single Sign-On service
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Install and coni gure the Inventory Service
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Install and coni gure vCenter Server
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Install and coni gure the Web Client service
Use vCenter Server's management features
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Introducing vCenter Server
As the size of a virtual infrastructure grows, managing the infrastructure from a central loca-
tion becomes signii cantly more important. vCenter Server is an application that serves as a
centralized management tool for ESXi hosts and their respective VMs. vCenter Server acts as
a proxy that performs tasks on the individual ESXi hosts that have been added as members of
a vCenter Server installation. As discussed in Chapter 1, “Introducing VMware vSphere 5.5,”
VMware includes vCenter Server licensing in every kit and every edition of vSphere, underscor-
ing the importance of vCenter Server. Although VMware does offer a few different editions
of vCenter Server (vCenter Server Essentials, vCenter Server Foundation, and vCenter Server
Standard), we'll focus only on vCenter Server Standard in this topic.
