With the new vCSA 6.0 increases and the vCenter to vCSA converter fling I'm interested in hearing real world experiences from those in a large environment from/if anyone who has made the change from vCenter Server (Windows) to vCenter Server Appliance.
I'm familiar with the vCSA and run it myself in my home lab, it works GREAT in this environment, even more so since TechNet is no more and it's one less Windows box I need to worry about re-installing every few months due to a trial license or even having to buy a license. However in a large environment where I have thousands of Windows virtual machines to manage with a MS agreement is already in place, saving one small server license is nothing to even really consider. In addition we use SRM (now supported in vCSA 6 I know) and VUM which isn't tied into vSCA so it would still require a Windows license.
In addition, I'm probably vaguely familiar with linux but overall we're mostly a Windows shop and Windows is what I spend 99% of my time in so if things was to go south it'd probably be easier to recovery from, for me, on a Windows box over Linux. If things really gets bad I could always just spin up a new windows box, install vCenter, point to the DB server and be back up and running. The appliance on the other hand I'm not to sure how to recover if it just stopped working, for whatever reason. To build off that, having separate servers for vCenter and Database is nice as we can backup each (vCenter and the database) individually which I don't believe is possible with the vCSA.
So with licensing aside, what other benefits does the vCSA bring that might be something for large environments to be interested in?