Premissions planning, ESXi vs vCenter

[tomhkr]

Greetings.

We have six ESXi 5.0 hosts in a cluster, running automated vMotion.
The vCenter is a VM inside this cluster and so is our Active Directory.

How should I plan with credentials access to the cluster?
A root privileges account on the ESXi hosts would give most "direct" access but is most likely not vMotion aware
A local administrator privileges account on the vCenter server would be dependent on the presence of the vCenter server (what happens if it goes down?)
An AD account same as above would be double dependent on both AD and vCenter presence

What would be the best way of letting Veeam manage a vMotion cluster without relying on vCenter presence?

[Vitaliy S.]

Not sure there is a way to properly manage your ESXi cluster without vCenter Server. The recommended way of backing up VMs is still to use vCenter Server connection (because of the vMotion). Also since your vCenter Server is virtual, you can configure a backup job to protect it.

[foggy]

Since VM moref ID is changed during the migration between the hosts, only adding VM to the job via vCenter can make the job vMotion-aware (i.e. able to track this change and continue to run normally).

[dellock6]

To better explain, there are actually two morefID: one at the host level (changed every time a vm is vmotioned) and one at the vcenter level. By using vcenter backup job is vmotion-aware because it follows the vcenter morefID.
Also, with vCenter you can create a job using dynamic containers like resource pools, folders or datastores.
IMHO, if there is a cluster managed by vCenter, there is no reason or advantage to run backups pointing at single ESXi servers.

Luca.