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krjhitch
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Two Datacenters with ESX

I have a current ESX installation of 20 servers in my datacenter. We have taken over a datacenter hub in a remote location from which we plan to build a new ESX farm of roughly equal size and present services from there to spoke sites.

I'm curious what the pros and cons are of setting up one virtualcenter server in each location, or just adding the new ESX site into our existing virtualcenter by creating a new 'datacenter' object. Is there anything gained/lost by setting them up under one virtualcenter?

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trojanjo
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Funny that you ask this. I just saw this document on VIOPS that may give you some help.

Proven Practice: ROBO - Managing Remote ESX Hosts Over WAN with VirtualCenter

My first thought is to be cheap and pay for one vCenter. If you started to look at using SRM you would need a vCenter server at the 2nd site anyways.

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trojanjo
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Funny that you ask this. I just saw this document on VIOPS that may give you some help.

Proven Practice: ROBO - Managing Remote ESX Hosts Over WAN with VirtualCenter

My first thought is to be cheap and pay for one vCenter. If you started to look at using SRM you would need a vCenter server at the 2nd site anyways.

-


Visit my blog. http://www.2vcps.com

Follow me:

---- Visit my blog. http://www.2vcps.com
Follow me: http://twitter.com/jon_2vcps
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krjhitch
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Exactly what I was looking for! Thank you

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Nick_F
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It seems to work OK for us, we have two pairs of datacenters (one pair with a 2Mb link the other with 256Kb). Only downside I've come across is in DR it means you have to recover a VC server at the other site but it's not a major hassle, if you use SRM for DR though it's a requirement to have a VC server at each location. I've not come across anything else so far that needs VC in each location. the other issue though is you need your service console routable from one of the sites which is a security concern but we've had no other choice (our original design was to have a non-routable primary SC and a routable one on the normal network that would only be enabled when we need to do stuff like conversions).

jguidroz
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I currently utilize one vCenter server to manage one local datacenter plus 6 remote datacenters. It works well to a point, but since we consider each site to be individual sites, I'm looking into installing a vCenter at each site to manage the local hosts. It's based on a business decision, not a performance decision.

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