Hi - and a Happy New Year to all
We have a customer with a current ESXi 5.0 installation, possibly going to 5.1. They are multi-site across a large geographical area with around 60 hosts in all, and each system on each site is self-contained and stand-alone - there are reasons for this - some sites run light-out and un-manned. They run a Windows domain at each site and the domains do not interact. If a WAN connection drops, the remote site has to be able to continue operations unaffected.
I have been tasked with retro-fitting vCenter into this system mainly because they want to use VUM, and like the idea of a single pane of glass. They do NOT, however, like the idea that they need to have domain accounts to run vCenter and it's causing me a headache. Unfortunately I can't discuss specifics of the system. I don't believe they really understand vCenter.
So - I'm looking for advice. Can I use linked-mode here? I've never used it personally but understand the principles. I think there is a strong argument to put the whole system in a forest but there's too many systems issues in the way. Heartbeat has been discounted simply due to the sheer licensing costs. I have put a single, stand-alone vCenter into a test system and added another site to it as a datacenter object to demo vCenter, and it works ok like that, however I'm not sure how that will work long-term and it will affect the ESXi licenses if they loose the WAN at a remote site, which worries me most. It can take weeks to get an engineer out to them.
Has anyone tried a system like this before? What would the best way to run vCenter be? The system is already running so I have to be careful what I do.