Clusters and Datacenters.

[MikeS1983]

Hi All,

I have a question. I have taken over administering a VM farm at my new company. At the other places I've worked with ESX I always used different datacenters for different physical sites. This VM farm I've taken over has one datacentre for 3 different sites. They are all on different networks and cannot see each others storage.

My question is: Is it better to use separate datacenters for different physical sites. What are the benefits (if any) of this and what are (if any) the implications of using the single datacenter?

Thanks

Mike.

[djciaro]

The organization of your VMware envirnoment should be split into the following categories:

folder, datacenter, cluster, resource pool, host, or virtual machine

It makes more sense to sperate Datacenters based on physical location, the functionality will remain the same, however I think it makes it easier to get a quick overview of the environment by naming and arranging Datacenters by name and physical location: (e.g DC_NYC, DC_LA etc)

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[Cooldude09]

Mike it doesn't matter how many datacenters you have. Design depends on how simple you want to keep for administering. some folks find it simple to have jst one datacenter and then later have different clsuters..some find keeping different datacenters...so choice is urs...

Anil Gupta

Don’t fear changes, its constant in life, reduce your ecological footprint……………………..Go Green

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[MikeS1983]

Thanks for the replies.

Mike.

[TomHowarth]

Although logically it may make sense to have seperate DCs for each Site, it can depend on a number of other factors, such as location of the main technical resource, if all Engineers are at a single location it is simpler to have a single vCenter and single DataCenter. licesning is centralised there is a single management point.

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "VMware Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment”.

[MikeS1983]

Yeah I see what you mean. I'm the only VMware engineer within the organisation looking after 4 sites across the region so I think it will come down to personal preference. Also we have only one VC server and one licensing server so management is centralised.

Thanks

Mike.