We're starting clean in a new environment with vCenter 5.1 (u1 b), and trying to agree on a design (and sizing). All servers will be VMs on HP blades. vCenter will manage about 50 hosts and 800 VMs for the foreseeable future. We were planning on installing two servers to split the components onto, but aren't sure exactly how to split them. When Heartbeat supports Windows Server 2012 (6.6 release this year?), we will install it as well to protect this environment. Keeping it on one server (in addition to the SQL server) would simplify Heartbeat setup.
SQL 2012 will be a separate server.
We like to have a DNS alias CNAME "vCenter.domain.com", so I think I'd like the WebClient and vCenter Server on the same system, so they can both be accessed by clients via this name.
However, it seems that the Inventory service may also make sense right alongside vCenter Server. This server would be relatively big from a RAM/CPU perspective, then.
Any advice? I don't see really any guidance on the subject on the web. What have you done?
Thanks.