Data Center Expert Virtual Appliance

[EcoStruxureIT]

Monitor and manage supported network-enabled devices with EcoStruxure IT Data Center Expert.

Get a 90-day trial of Data Center Expert 9.0.0 Virtual Machine software to monitor 5 device nodes.

The EcoStruxure IT Data Center Expert Virtual Appliance help fully describes deploying the Data Center Expert virtual appliance, and the upgrade and migration processes.

This information is also available as a separate document on se.com.

Download the Data Center Expert Virtual Machine  *.ova or *.vhdx file 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.

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

New in DCE 9.0.0

The DCE Virtual Machine software has a monitoring limit of five nodes (devices and surveillance cameras) and will operate in trial mode for 90 days.

During this time, some features will be temporarily restricted, such as server upgrades, device firmware updates, and video surveillance clip retrieval. Video clips will continue to be recorded.

You can purchase a subscription license on the mySchneider Software Management website 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.

More about mySchneider Software Management...

About the DCE virtual appliance

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.

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.

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.

Migrating a DCE hardware server to a virtual appliance

To migrate a Data Center Expert hardware server to a virtual appliance, you must purchase and apply a subscription license, and contact APC Support to assist you in migrating the license to the virtual appliance.

You will be 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 in thr desktop client.

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

See also

Links to older versions of DCE VM software are here.

[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

[jamesr]

Previous server upgrades (including 8.3.0) were imported into DCE as .zip files, and that's the only file type the update wizard wants to open. How do I import an OVA or VHDX file?