VMware vCenter Server is the heart of most VMware products. It manages the VMs and hosts of the datacenter. For VMware Horizon View, vCenter is essential to allocating new VMs and balancing the VMs across multiple hosts. vCenter also manages the power state of View VMs and the resource allocation.
vCenter is required for the following functions to work:
Power on/off/reset: vCenter will power on, off, or reset all the VMs in the View environment.
VMware High Availability: vCenter is responsible for configuring hosts to act in an appropriate manner in the event of a host failure. In the event of a host failure, the failure will be detected and VMs will be restarted on working hosts.
VMware vMotion: vCenter is responsible for migrating VMs between hosts in a cluster.
VMware DRS: vCenter will monitor host resources and can automatically migrate VMs between hosts to balance the load. DRS can also be used to separate redundant VMs to ensure that the system continues to operate in the event of a host failure. DRS should be implemented on clusters where shared storage is used, such as Virtual SAN or any SAN or NAS configuration. DRS is not required for clusters where the hosts only have local storage.
View Composer: vCenter is required by the View Composer to accomplish any task managing the link-cloned desktops.