vCenter server is vSphere's virtualization platform that provides the necessary management framework to deliver the needs of today's virtualization administrators. So you need to be very careful about taking decisions while designing your vCenter and management platform, which will have performance factors integrated as well. vCenter can be installed in two ways: on top of a Windows server or as a virtual appliance.

In this chapter, we will talk about vCenter running on Windows. In vSphere 6.x, there are two components to the vCenter server installation: vCenter server itself and Platform Services Controller (PSC). For small vSphere installations, both the components can be installed on the same VM. For large-scale deployments, vCenter components will be installed on a VM and PSC will be installed on one or more different VMs. For these recipes, we will install PSC on its own VM.