What is vCenter Server Appliance

The vCenter Server appliance is a preconfigured virtual machine that is optimized for running vCenter Server and the associated services.

The vCenter Server appliance package contains the following software:

• Photon OS^® 3.0
• The vSphere authentication services
• PostgreSQL
• VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager Extension
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager

Version 8.0 of vCenter Server is deployed with virtual hardware version 10, which supports 64 virtual CPUs per virtual machine in ESXi.

During the deployment, you can choose the vCenter Server appliance size for your vSphere environment size and the storage size for your database requirements.

vCenter Server uses the VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager Extension service. An external vSphere Lifecycle Manager instance on Windows is no longer required for vSphere centralized automated patch and version management. For information about the vCenter Server see vCenter Server Components and Services.

vCenter Server supports high availability. For information about configuring vCenter Server in a vCenter High Availability cluster, see vSphere Availability.

vCenter Server supports file-based backup and restore. For information backing up and restoring, see File-Based Backup and Restore of vCenter Server.

For information about the vCenter Server maximums, see VMware Configuration Maximums.