How to use a datacenter?

[Gabrie1]

Hi

In VC you can create datacenters, but I can't exactly find WHY you would want to split your environment into two or more datacenters and not just clusters. What are the benefits of creating multiple datacenters?

Gabrie

[wcrahen]

I believe the concept is that you might want to manage 2 physical locations with one VC, you can create each as it's own datacenter for a logical separation.

[FredPeterson]

I am using it in an environment where one set of servers is running ESX 2.5 and the other VI3 AND the servers in one 'datacenter' are not compatible for live VMotion with the other.

Prevents you from being able to even select the other set of servers in a Migrate. I know that VC will check for VMotion compatibility, but its also to distinguish the ESX version in my case.

[vmmeup]

You can accomplish the same thing with clusters in your situation. The datacenter object is really just for distinguishing different data centers, or permissions, but again if you have one datacenter you can achieve all the same with just having separate clusters.

[Gabrie1]

I agree with vmmeup, that in the previous posts, there is no hard reason to use a datacenter above a cluster. All these things I could also do using clusters. In fact, using a datacenter would make it even harder to manage two locations because of the restrictions you put on your self in this way.

Gabrie

[iguy]

We are planning on using it to seperate hosts by SAN Frame. Since you can't effectively VMotion between SAN Frames. Then inside of that we can break down by clusters defining what each host group's purpose is (Production, Test, Stage, Dedicated to a given Application, etc).

As a result we also get some level of separation since we do not typically attach a given Host to multiple Frames. Granted this may change in the near future but it is something that gives us a big bonus in organization.

[ZMkenzie · Accepted solution]

Datacenter are useful when you want to FORCE separation between working areas. For example here we have 3 main datacenters:

\- production

\- testing

\- disaster recovery

This is useful expecially when you have totally separated farms, with different storage luns, different networks and different users accessing them through the virtual infrastructure client.