I’m wondering what everyone else in the world does… I’m investigating running Virtual Center/vCenter as a virtual machine in order to remove two additional physical servers running Windows 2003 Enterprise in a cluster. I’m also very interested in running vCenter as a Linux virtual appliance when that becomes available. Is anyone out there running vCenter as a virtual machine? If so, how do you do it? Do you run it on a separate ESX cluster from the clusters it manages? How do you protect this in the event of a storage or ESX failure or some kind?  Does anyone else NOT do this for specific reasons? Anyone else running vCenter 2.5 in a Windows cluster (MCSC)?   If not, how do you protect your vCenter to make it resilient to failures? Just looking for other people’s personal experiences, not necisarily a corporate recommendation…
As a side note, we recently upgraded our farm from Virtual Center 2.0 to 2.5. Since that time, I’m seeing some things that I don’t necessarily think are working properly. We have Update Manager and Converter Enterprise installed and both services seem to go AWOL on us from time to time, disconnecting or just going unavailable from the Plug-Ins in Virtual Infrastructure Client. Not seeing much so far in VMware KB to help with running these peripherial services in a Windows cluster… Any help there would be greatly appreciated too…