Designing your VMWare infrastructure: Production, test, development

[thecoffeeguy]

Just something I was thinking about and wanted to ask people here, who have configured their environments and some good guidelines to follow.

We are moving forward with our environment, including production, test and development.

The one real big caveat to this whole thing (and I am embarassed to even say this) is that our network is a flat Class A network. I know how bad that is. You don't have to convince me, but we are bound right now to keep this flat network from the upper management. It is a very long story (frustrating one too), but believe me, we are trying to get off this and go to a private IP address scheme and VLAN's.

With that in mine, how do people setup their VMWare environments? Do a lot of people have production, test and development on the same cluster? Or do you have different clusters; one for production, one for test and development?

What are some guidelines?

Not sure what to think about having production, test and development on the same VM cluster. My instincts want to break it out and have seperate clusters for seperation.

Anyone care to comment on this?

Things to consider?

Things to avoid?

Thanks for the feedback.

TCG

[Ken_Cline]

I would put all three on the same cluster and separate them using resource pools. You can start out with your resource pools being unlimited, and as your workload grows and you start to see what the usage patterns look like, you can set limits and reservations to meet the actual demands.

What you will likely find is that the usage patterns for the three environments vary widely - which will allow you to make the most from your virtual infrastructure.