The following figure shows an example where multiple VxRail clusters are part of a customer-supplied vCenter environment. Each cluster appears as a separate cluster within vCenter. In addition to centralized management, being part of the same vCenter environment allows VMs to be easily migrated into and between vSAN environments for optimal workload balance and simplifies VxRail appliance upgrades and expansion.

Note: The customer-supplied vCenter Server deployment can be a physical server or a virtual server running on a vCenter Server appliance. 

Use cases

A customer-supplied vCenter Server solution is required when:

• VxRail is being added to an existing VMware platform, and a single management instance is desired.
• Multiple VxRail clusters are deployed, and a single management interface is desired.
• vCenter Server cannot be deployed on the 2-Node cluster.

In versions earlier than VxRail 4.5.200, customer-supplied vCenter Server solution is required when:

• Stretched clusters are part of the solution.
• vSAN encryption is desired. When enabling Data at Rest Encryption (DARE) in a vSAN cluster, the Key Management Server (KMS) must be external to the vSAN cluster.

Limitations

• VxRail Manager does not upgrade the customer-supplied vCenter Server. Before an upgrade of VxRail appliance software, see the release notes to verify the minimum required vCenter Server release number. It might be necessary to upgrade the customer-supplied vCenter Server before the VxRail upgrade.
• RPQ is required if the customer-supplied vCenter Server is hosted on a VxRail cluster running versions earlier than 4.7.

• The VxRail cluster Shutdown function requires that you power off all VMs manually.
• We highly recommend the vCenter be backed up to a remote site in case a vSAN failure occurs.

Notes