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 resides on the vVol 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 applianceis are required for the ESXi host to authenticate to the VASA provider to access the vVols.
• Having them reside on the 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 vCenter and or the VASA appliances resided on the vVOl and they're currently down then 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