If your VMware infrastructure contains no more than 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines, you can save some effort and Windows license fee by using the VMware vCenter Server Appliance instead of the vCenter Server on a Windows machine. The vCenter Server Appliance is a preconfigured Suse Linux-based virtual machine, with PostgreSQL for the embedded database.

The vCenter appliance is easy to deploy and configure, and it will save you time and maintenance effort, because unlike Windows, you do not have to install anti-virus and monthly patches. It can join Active Directory for user authentication. It will save you Windows license fee, but you still need to purchase vCenter license.

The vCenter appliance can be downloaded from the VMware site as an ova or an ovf plus vmdk files. You do not need to download the ovf and the vmdk files if you downloaded the ova file. Ova file is merely a single file distribution of ovf and vmdk, stored in tar format.

To deploy the appliance, use the vSphere Client and deploy the downloaded ova file as an ovf template. You can deploy it as a thin provisioned format if you do not want to commit 80GB space right away. Once deployed and powered on, you can continue with the rest of the configuration using the GUI browser based interface at https://vCenterserver:5400/. The vCenter Server Appliance has the default user name root and password vmware.

The wizard will guide you through the rest of the configuration. There are really very few configuration items. The common ones are static IP address (if you don’t want dhcp), and the Active Directory settings. And the best thing is, you do not have to manage/configure the Suse-Linux-based appliance via CLI. Everything can be managed via the GUI browser-based interface.