Hey all,
We just decided to move to ESXi with vCenter essentials to manage about half a rack full of servers that basically serve the needs of our small campus.
We actually moved away from HA-Clusters and went towards stand-alone servers with solid redundancy features due to a lack of budget, a fairly lax acceptable downtime policy, and for ease of administration.
My question comes in here. Currently I have vCenter server installed on our heaviest duty server that has about 3-5 other VMs running at different times. That server is managed by the vCenter server instance on that VM. So I guess there is a little bit of an "infinite loop" going on in my head that says that if ESXi takes a turn for the worse, that server is gone for good? Am I missing something, or is there an easy way to do a bare metal restoration of an entire server in the case that vCenter can't be accessed? I guess this makes me VERY concerned knowing that the desktop client is on it's way out. It sounds like a situation where "accidental lockouts" are going to be very common. And I don't really like the sound of that.
Thanks,