The big news has struck, vCenter now becomes as a virtual appliance! Who's ready to take the plunge? I know I'm certainty not. I feel that you should hold off on deploying the vCenter linux based appliance in an enterprise production environment for now. Let's go through some of the pros and cons.
Pros:
1. Moving a critical service to an appliance.
You might be saying to yourself… Kenny, you just said the word "critical" and "appliance" in the same sentence? In my opinion, deploying as an appliance creates a more stable platform. The appliance won't be subject to "patch tuesday" which requires components to not break to keep your OS up to date. We are going to see a lot of VMware's products move to appliance based models, which is a great trend to get rid of Windows dependencies and have VMs be able to do their job with significantly less resources.
2. Deployment is cake
Deploying an OVF is simple and takes away the administration overhead of deploying a new Windows VM from template. Configuration is very simple from the WebUI and is done in the matter of just a few clicks. Getting rid of the Microsoft overhead of dealing with a full blown OS is starting to trickle away.
3. Saving an addition Windows License
I think the appliance is going to be great for SMBs who struggle with paying for Windows licenses. But, this doesn't effect the large portion of VMware users? Why? First, a lot of companies have Microsoft ELAs or a large number of Windows licenses they can use. Second, a lot of customers do Microsoft Data Center licensing so as long as they can cram a bunch of Windows VMs on a single server, they only pay a set amount of money
Cons:
1. Interoperability with other services
One might come to mind right away. VMware View Composer. View Composer is a component of View that is installed on the vCenter server that does the automated provisioning and customization of virtual desktops. Not being able to use View composer is one of the biggest reasons I stood my ground about not moving to the appliance based model until these features are built around it. At the same time, there are other applications from 3rd party companies that are installed on the vCenter server as plug-ins which would no longer work. The vCenter appliance has all the APIs built around it, so these restrictions should be lifted eventually.
2. Other vCenter components aren't deployed with the appliance
If you've popped in the new Windows based vCenter ISO, you would see an array of new features. There is a log collector for your ESXi hosts, web services, auto-deploy, orchestrator, etc. Granted, you've moved 1 service to an appliance, but all of these other features still have to be installed on a Windows guest.
3. Version 1.0
Like all things in tech, there are early adopters and there are the people who will wait for SP1. I am usually on the early adopter side of the spectrum, but this is a dramatic shift in the way we have been dealing with vCenter, so it's best to wait for most bugs to be worked out.
4. No easy migration path
If you're a SMB getting into virtualization and this is going to be a greenfield deployment, I say give the vCenter appliance a shot. If you have been with VMware for a while, migrating to the virtual appliance isn't an easy task. Look at it the same way as having to deploy a brand new Windows vCenter server. All your hosts, must be removed from the original vCenter instance and added to the new appliance instance. This isn't something most admins want to deal with on day 1. It's going to be much easier to do an upgrade on the Windows box.
I love the forward thinking VMware has with the virtual appliance based model, but give it some time until the early adopters take their stab at it and the technology has matured a bit more.
