ESXI hosts on remote site from vCenter server

[itpassionate77]

Hello all,

I would like to have an advice for the design of vSphere for one of my customer that plan to develop its business by creating new production sites.

For the moment, my customer is not using virtualization at all and has only one production site.

I plan to use vSphere Standard Acceleration kit to optimize the global design of the future solution.

The main site would be in a datacenter with a HA/DRS enabled cluster where the vCenter resides as a VM. ESXI hosts and vCenter will be integrated in AD that will be also VM.

I plan to install an ESXI host on each remote site and connect it to the DC and to the vCenter via a VPN connection. These hosts, won't be integrated in the cluster 😉 and act as standalone host but will be managed by the same licence.

Do you think it's a design error especially if the VPN link fails or if the Internet line is cut for a certain period?

Will it have a bad impact on vCenter Operations except that the vCenter will show the remote host as disconnected? 

Thanks all for your contribution,

Best regards,

Michaël

[schepp]

Hi,

I'm not a VCDX, so I may not be the best partner for special design questions , but here are some thoughts, as I run standalone ESXi hosts at remote Datacenters myself:

one ESXi host per remote site shoudln't be a problem, and also the loss of the VPN connection should have minimal impact. Your ESXi host and the VMs on it will continue to run as if like nothing happened.

One thing to keep in mind though is the AD integration. If your remote site VMs are integrated into the AD and the VPN connection breaks, you might not be able to log into those remote site VMs (except they cached your AD Account information). So if you remote site VMs are integrated into AD you might want to run a secondary Domain Controller at each remote location.

Regards

[iw123]

Hi,

I agree with all of the above. The AD issue is an important consideration - it would definately be worth running a DC, ( or read only DC) at your branch locations, though this is more of a active directory design consideration than something purely VM related.

[itpassionate77]

Hi,

thanks for your quick reply!!! My objective was effectively to create Domain Controller on each remote site to permits users log on even if there's a Internet cut.

To improve Business Continuity, I planned also, to put in place DFS to permit users to keep access to files (that will be cashed on the local server) even if a Internet cuts happens.

Regards,

Michaël

[iw123]

Hi,

For your local file caching you might want to look into BranchCache (part of windows 2008 R2) - see link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/network/dd425028.aspx

Thanks

[itpassionate77]

Hi,

Thanks for your contribution! I will read the BranchCache documentation

Good spot!

Regards,

Michaël

[itpassionate77]

My VMware classroom gave me a nice document about this topic:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-WP-Performance-vCenter.pdf

It's very nice!

Thanks again for your help on this!