Data Center Expert Virtual Appliance

[EcoStruxureIT]

The EcoStruxure IT Data Center Expert Virtual Appliance help fully describes deploying the Data Center Expert virtual appliance, and the upgrade and migration processes. It is available as a separate document on the APC web site.

Download the 5 node trial of the Data Center Expert Virtual machine

The Data Center Expert server is available as a virtual appliance, supported on VMware ESXi 6.7 or newer, and, in DCE 8.1.1 and newer, supported on Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2019 and 2022.

The full-featured demo of the virtual appliance monitors up to five device nodes and one surveillance node.

You can purchase a license key to upgrade to a production version to monitor additional device nodes and activate supported applications, or to migrate from a server hardware version to a virtual appliance.

Note: In Data Center Expert 8.1.0 and newer, the Data Center Expert Virtual Appliance OVA is built on VMware ESXi 6.7. Only E1000E and VMXNET3 network adapters are supported.

VMware ESXi 4.1.0 was used as the reference virtualization platform in previous versions and during the development of the Data Center Expert 7.2.x virtual appliance, and is the first supported virtualization platform.

Although the DCE VM may function properly on any virtualization platform that supports these formats or has an appropriate converter utility, only VMware ESXi and on-premises Hyper-V have been tested and are supported.

To use the full-featured demo version of the Data Center Expert virtual appliance, you download the *.ova or *.vhdx file from the APC web site, and deploy it to your virtualization platform using the default hardware configuration.
For more information, see Hardware resource configuration guidelines and Data Center Expert virtual appliance equivalent configurations.

The demo version monitors a maximum of five device nodes and one surveillance node by default.

To monitor 25 device nodes, add license keys to monitor additional nodes, or activate supported applications, you must upgrade the Data Center Expert virtual appliance demo to the production version.

Note: You can add an additional network adapter to enable private networking, or add additional hard disks to increase storage, after the Data Center Expert virtual appliance is deployed.

To upgrade the demo to the production version, you must purchase and apply an activation key, available on the APC web site.

To monitor additional device nodes or activate supported applications, you must purchase and apply node license keys and application license keys for the virtual appliance.

To migrate a Data Center Expert hardware server to a virtual appliance, you must purchase and apply an activation key, and contact APC Support for new node license keys and application license keys for the virtual appliance.

To receive these keys, you are required to provide a unique MAC address and serial number for the Data Center Expert virtual appliance, and for the Data Center Expert hardware server you are replacing.

A unique serial number is generated for the Data Center Expert virtual appliance at startup. It is displayed in the About Data Center Expert display, accessed from the Help menu.

Note: The serial number for a Data Center Expert hardware server appears only on its serial number sticker.

[satheeshk]

what is  the purpose the  DCE server prefered with Virtual server.

[Cory_McDonald]

@satheeshk,  Using the Data Center Expert virtual appliance or using the physical appliance is up to your preference and your environment.

The main concern over a physical appliance would be that it is dependent on specific hardware and if there is a failure it will take time to procure a replacement appliance (either via warranty or purchase outside of warranty).

Virtual appliances can be deployed on either VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V environments and can be recovered much quicker since it is depending on your available virtualized environment.  You can also scale resources within your virtual environments if it is determined if more resources are needed (RAM, CPU, or disk space).

Ultimately the decision between physical and virtual usually comes down to what is available within your environment for virtualization and the physical location of where the virtualization is available in regards to the location of the devices you wish to monitor.

You can always deploy the Data Center Expert trial within a supported virtualization platform to test out if the virtualized route is one that you would like to go with before making any purchases.

Kind Regards,

Cory