Hi,
Just after some opinions as I've seen conflicting views on this.
I have half a dozen vCenter Server instances. They're all on the same AD domain but quite geographically disperse and the links are of varying quality. Each site has its own VC based on vSphere 5.0 on Server 2008 with a separate MS SQL server providing database duties. Each VC has its own (local) Single Sign On instance hosted on the local SQL DB. All the instances are stand-alone, there's no linked mode and or other dependencies between them. Other than the AD they're completely isolated. They're also quite small (few hundred VMs, less than ten hosts).
I'm planning to upgrade to 5.5 and am considering my options for SSO. According to the 5.5 Documentation Centre I have three options for SSO - Standalone/Basic, High Availability and Multisite.
Ignoring High Availability, I'm not sure if I should go for basic, with a standalone (local to the VC) SSO at each site or Multisite, with a local SSO at each site but part of the same SSO authentication domain. The 5.5 Documentation Centre indicates that if I'm not using Linked Mode (which I'm not) then a basic deployment at each site will be fine.
However, reading KB 20724335 the last line seems to indicate that multisite is best for SSO instances after the first install.
Important: VMware recommends this deployment mode when installing any additional vCenter Single Sign-On servers in your environment.
At the moment I'm inclined to keep it simple and stick to basic but I'd like to see if anyone else has done this differently and if I should go down the multisite route?
Thanks
Chris