Don't place vCenter and/or the VASA appliance on a vVol Datastore.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• If the vCenter and/or the VASA appliance reside on a vVol datastore and if something should happen/change in the environment and we lose access to the vVol then we've also lost access to vCenter and/or the VASA appliance along with our management capabilities of the vVol to fix the issue.
• vCenter and the VASA appliances are required for the ESXi host(s) to authenticate to the VASA provider to access the vVols.
• Having these appliances reside on a vVol datastore creates a circular redundancy.

Resolution

Deploy vCenter and the VASA Appliances to a VMFS or NFS datastore. See vVols FAQ page 6 for more details

If the vCenter and/or the VASA appliances reside on a vVol datastore and they're currently down, deploy a new vCenter restoring from backup and/or new VASA appliances to restore access to your vVols.

Additional Information

vVols Getting Started Guide
vVols Best Practices Summary
Impact on the Management Path