One Virtual Center and ESX servers in multiple countries (Latvia, Ukraine, Lithuania)

[Arvis_Ozolins]

Morning,

We have installed 4 ESX servers in Latvia and are about to install 4 more in Ukraine and Lithuania. The idea is to avoid extra investments to Virtual Centers in each countries by using shared Virtual Center in Latvia.

What are major concerns we have to consider before go on?

What activities and how often are actually happening between ESX and Virtual Center?

What are requirements for network connection between ESX'es in other countries and Virtual Center in Latvia?

What would happen to ESX if network connection to Virtual Center is down for 24 hours?

Thanks,

Arvis

[Rodos]

Major concerns would be security and latency. There is constant activity between the hosts and vc but the cluster will continue to operate if connectivity is lost, although certain features (like DRS) will not function.

Sounds like an all round bad idea to me.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

VC uses an SSL based connection to the ESX Server. If you change out the default certificates with stronger ones then you should be fine from a security perspective. However, there are ways to defeat SSL currently available.

Your VC server could constantly show the ESX server disconnected, which would then possibly fire off DRS or other things within VC if you have licenses for these. If the country ESX servers are individual servers then this is not a big issue, but if they are clusters, you may want a VC in each country just to be on the safe side.

Whether to use one VC or multiple depends more on your configuration in each country than anything else, I know many companies managing wouldwide ESX servers from a single location.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization