Where is my vCenter VM

Where is my vCenter VM?

If you have a big VMware infrastructure and need to solve any problem with vCenter VM, it is not a seldom problem that it is difficult to know where (exactly, on which ESXi host) the VM is located.

How to mitigate that problem? Generally, depends on size of infrastructure, I recommend two options:

Dedicated Management Cluster

The Management Cluster hosts all of the critical vCloud infrastructure components (ex. vCenter, VUM, SRM, SSO, AD etc). Separating infrastructure components from production resources  improves manageability of the vCloud infrastructure (ex. search vCenter VM ;)

DRS rule for vCenter VM

If you have not a big infrastracture enough to have the management cluster, you can use VM-Host Affinity rule. It allows you to pin vCenter on to a set of ESXi hosts (I recommend 2 hosts)  and  prevent DRS from auto-migrating the virtual machines to other ESX hosts.

To create an affinity Rule in vCenter, see the below steps:

Right click the Cluster > Edit Settings.

Enable DRS, if it is not already enabled.

Click Rules > Add.

Click the DRS Groups Manager tab.

Click Add under Host DRS Groups to create a new Host DRS Group containing the hosts in the cluster that you want to tie the VMs to.

Click Add under Virtual Machine DRS Groups to create a Virtual Machine DRS Group for all of the virtual machines that you want to tie to hosts listed in the Host group created above

Click the Rule tab, give the new rule a name and from the Type drop-down menu, click Virtual Machines to Hosts.

Under Cluster Vm Group select the newly created VM group.

Select Must run on hosts in group

Under Cluster Host Group select the newly created Cluster Host Group and click OK.

Thats all you're done !!

Happy learning