Prerequisites for Deploying the vCenter Server Appliance

To ensure a successful deployment of the vCenter Server appliance, you must perform some required tasks and pre-checks before running the installer.

General Prerequisites

• Download and Mount the vCenter Server Installer.

Target System Prerequisites

• Verify that your system meets the minimum software and hardware requirements. See System Requirements for the vCenter Server Appliance.
• If you want to deploy the appliance on an ESXi host, verify that the ESXi host is not in lockdown or maintenance mode and not part of a fully automated DRS cluster.
• If you want to deploy the appliance on a DRS cluster of the inventory of a vCenter Server instance, verify that the cluster contains at least one ESXi host that is not in lockdown or maintenance mode.
• If you plan to use NTP servers for time synchronization, verify that the NTP servers are running and that the time between the NTP servers and the target server on which you want to deploy the appliance is synchronized.

• If you want to deploy the appliance on a vSAN ESA cluster with vSAN ESA encryption, you must enable vSAN ESA encryption before installing vCenter Server. vSAN Express Storage Architecture is a next-generation architecture designed to get the most out of high-performance storage devices, resulting in greater performance and efficiency. You can enable vSAN ESA encryption through vSAN SDK or vSAN API.

vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode Prerequisites

When deploying a new vCenter Server as part of an Enhanced Linked Mode deployment, create an image-based backup of the existing vCenter Server nodes in your environment. You can use the backup as a precaution in case there is a failure during the deployment process.

If the deployment fails, delete the newly deployed vCenter Server appliance, and restore the vCenter Server nodes from their respective image-based backups. You must restore all the nodes in the environment from their image-based backups. Failing to do so can cause the replication partners to be out of synchronization with the restored node.

• To learn more about creating vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode deployments, see vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode.
• To learn about image-based backs, see Image-Based Backup and Restore of a vCenter Server Environment.

Network Prerequisites

If you plan to assign a static IP address and an FQDN as a system name in the network settings of the appliance, verify that you have configured the forward and reverse DNS records for the IP address.