VMware® Infrastructure 3 FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter 9. Getting VMware VirtualCenter Running

VMware VirtualCenter is your single management interface for fault-tolerant virtual infrastructures. Although you can manage each ESX separately, VirtualCenter gives you a single place to go for all your virtual infrastructure–management tasks, such as creating virtual machines and monitoring how everything is running. (You can read about ESX in Chapters 4 and 5, and fault-tolerance in Part IV.)

Tip

Sorry, but some quick nomenclature is needed before delving into VirtualCenter. When using the proper name of the product, I write this name as VMware VirtualCenter (or just VirtualCenter). When I refer to any virtual center, or the concept of a virtual center, I write it as lowercase letters.

With that said, This chapter covers the information you need to know to install VirtualCenter and add ESX machines to it.

VMware VirtualCenter: The Brains Behind the System

After you add an ESX to a virtual center, you never have to connect to that server directly again. VirtualCenter installs a remote management agent on any ESX that you add to its inventory. Your virtual center becomes a proxy manager. However, centralized management is just the beginning. Using VirtualCenter gives you many other benefits.

Figure 9-1 shows the initial page when you connect to VirtualCenter using you VIC. You can see virtual clusters (a way to make your VMs fault-tolerant is covered in Chapter 12) and the ESX hosts in them. Below that you can see any resource pools (a ...