In last post of this series we discussed about various deployment models available for deploying vCenter Server and PSC. In this post we will look into minimum system requirements  that must be met for installing windows based vcenter Server.

If you have missed earlier post of this series, you can read them from below links:

1: Installing and Configuring Esxi

2: VCSA Overview

3: vCenter Server and PSC Deployment Types

vCenter Server for Windows Requirements

To install vCenter Server on a windows, following hardware and software requirements must be met:

1: NTP ready environment : Clocks must be synchronized on the virtual machines where vCenter Server and PSC will be deployed. I previously wrote a blog on configuring Domain controller as NTP and you can read the article from here

2: Environment should be DNS Ready: Make sure you can successfully resolve hostnames of the servers. Also ensure Name to IP and IP to name resolution is happening fine for all the servers.

3: Dedicated Service Account for vCenter: If your vCenter Server service is running in a user account other than the Local System account, verify that the user account in which the vCenter Server service is running has the following permissions:

• Member of the Administrators group
• Log on as a service

4: Verify that the system on which you are installing vCenter Server is not an Active Directory domain controller.

5: Static IP for vCenter: Make sure you are using static IP for your vcenter Server.

Important Note:

If the system that you use for your vCenter Server installation belongs to a workgroup rather than a domain, not all functionality is available to vCenter Server. If assigned to a workgroup, the vCenter Server system is not able to discover all domains and systems available on the network when using some features.

6: Your host machine must be connected to a domain if you want to add Active Directory identity sources after the installation.

7: Verify that the LOCAL SERVICE account has read permission on the folder in which vCenter Server is installed and on the HKLM registry.

8: Verify that the connection between the virtual machine or physical server and the domain controller is working.

Pre-Install Checks for vCenter Server and PSC on Windows

When vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller are installed on Windows, the installer does a pre-check, for example, to verify that enough space is available on the virtual machine or physical server where you are installing or upgrading vCenter Server, and verifies that the external database, if any, can be successfully accessed etc.

The pre-install checker typically performs following  checks:

• Windows version
• Minimum processor requirements
• Minimum memory requirements
• Minimum disk space requirements
• Permissions on the selected install and data directory
• Internal and external port availability
• External database version
• External database connectivity
• Administrator privileges on the Windows machine
• Any credentials that you enter

Hardware Requirements for vCenter Server and PSC on Windows

Below list summarizes the hardware requirements for vCenter and PSC

Storage Requirements for vCenter Server and PSC on Windows

Software Requirements for vCenter Server and PSC on Windows

1: Verify that your operating system supports vCenter Server. For a list of supported OS please see VMware KB-2091273.

2: vCenter Server requires a 64-bit operating system, and the 64-bit system DSN is required for vCenter Server to connect to the external database.

Database Requirements for vCenter Server on Windows

For environments with up to 20 hosts and 200 virtual machines, you can use the bundled PostgreSQL database. A larger installation requires a supported external database for the size of the environment.

Following external databases are supported:

• SQL 2008 R2, SQL 2012 and SQL 2014
• Oracle 11g and 12c

In next post of this series we will look into vCenter Server Installation on Windows.

I hope this post is informational to you. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing. Be sociable