VM Tags vs Custom Attributes

[nettech1]

Hi,

We have Dev and Test VMs ruining in the same vmware cluster. In effort to automate some of the manual tasks we would like to assign the environment variables to the VMs.

Ex: A group of web servers WEB01, WEB02, WEB03 should have a DEV label and WEB05, WEB06 would be TEST.

So the question is what should we be used VM Tags or Custom Attributes to assign vms to their environments. The plan is to use the tag or custom attributes later as a filter in powercli when working with a group of the vms.

Thanks

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

Tags are a little more flexible and also neater in the inventory, so I'd go with that.

[nettech1]

Tags it is

[nettech1]

Did I get this right?

Group is the tag name and environment is category ?

[nettech1]

Looks like it's the other way around

Create a new category called “Availability” and choose “one tag per object” (because if a virtual machine is classified as “Production” it cannot be “Test” or “DEV”). In the wizard, you can also specify if the new category is associable only with dedicated object types or all:

http://www.running-system.com/vmware-vsphere-tags-categories/

[Tibmeister]

Tags are searchable and can be enumerated easily in scripts and the web client.