Best Practice for Naming Virtual Servers

[OpsMan]

My organization is currently enforcing naming conventions across the enterprise in an effort to standardize processes and operational procedures. Does anyone have any information on:

1. What naming standards are promoted by VMware?

2. What benefits does a common standard provide in the virtual environment?

[Cloneranger]

All my VMs are named after cities/towns in the Raymond Feist novels,

All my physical hosts are named after Gods and Worlds in the same novels,

Sad but it works for me,

In VC I add (live) or (test) or (backup) to the VMs

[c_g-hills]

There are a couple of reasons we name computers using the badge number. Firstly it means that a computer cannot be joined to the network without having been recorded in the asset database. Secondly, the name provides an OS-agnostic way for the automated network asset discovery system to match up hosts to assets in our inventory management database. Our friendly names are currently based upon big cats and marsupials.

[Cloneranger]

are there enough big cats and marsupials though? :smileygrin:

[dkfbp]

We use the same naming convention for physical and virtual servers. It works great for us. I would not change it.

[caciolli]

Great!

and it is also politically correct....

[Erik_Zandboer]

In a company where I used to work, all servers were named after Lord of the Rings names and their "non existent" language

[Cloneranger]

star wars the last place I worked,

I nearly spat my coffee over my screen when I first saw this in the event log:

'the server yoda believes it is the master browser'

[Erik_Zandboer]

LOL

[ngrundy]

We use the same naming scheme for physical and virtual servers. Names take on the form

SECTION|SITE|SERVICE|NUM|\[-rac]

Section is a 3 letter code, Site is a 3 letter code, Service is generally freeform, -rac denotes a out of band management interface.

Our Section is ITS, we have a site which we shorten to SBY we also have another site we shorten to CCC, so a Physical ESX host in the site CCC would be

ITSCCCVM1

It's remote management card (DRAC in this case)

ITSCCCVM1-rac

Exchange servers would be

ITSSBYEXCH1

File servers

ITSCCCFS2

Pretty simple really.

[ejward]

We stick a V or a VM in the name of newly created VMs. For one, there's no place to put an asset tag. Another reason is to let the end user or developer know that they are on a virtual machine. Many developers we have use both physical and virtual machines. They know that they can add resources to a VM. Or, just crank up the resources during month end. They can't do that on a physical machine.

Our general naming convention is country (US) 3 positions for the building code (We have the benifit of being the central datacenter for the US), V or VM, then a code for the app on the server.

For P2V's, we keep the same server name within the VM however, I've been sticking a "_P2V" at the end of the display name. Just so i can tell at a glance how many physical servers I've pulled out of production.

I'm not sure who posted it but, spaces and special characters in names are very bad. Especially if you have to use VMKFSTOOLS for some reason.