National vCenter deployment

[mdterp]

I have over 100 sites across the USA.  All have decent bandwidth connectivity back to the HQ.  I am fairly new to VMware, but have a long IT background.

Someone decided to roll out vCenter Appliances at each site or maybe just a few.  That seems crazy.  vCenter is for central admin, right?

My thinking is that we should have one full vCenter install in windows at the HQ that manages the rest, maybe a better plan would be to run one in the east and one in the west and link them.

This project has not started yet, but I believe it is going to start soon.

[pierreLx]

Hi,

First of all, Linked Mode is not supported in vCenter Appliance so you won't be able to manage to whole infrastructure on a single vsphere client window.

One thing to take care of is that vCenter retrieve statistics from hosts and VMs and it can be a real problem if you have a lot of vms on remote sites and manage by a single vCenter.

So multiple vCenter in linked mode is the best choice.

Regards

Pierre

[schepp]

You should also consider the vSphere maximums: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-maximums.pdf

With 100 sites it sounds like you might hit the configuration maxixum of 1000 ESXi hosts per vCenter instance.

Regards

[mdterp]

I meant to add that I knew the vCenter appliance doesnt support linked mode.. but thanks for the reminder.  It sure is easy to deploy it!

Right now there are very few hosts and VMs.  2 hosts at each site and a total of at most 5 VMs.  Very small deployment.

For growth purposes I like the idea of maybe a vCenter to managed the East and one for the West.  Or some other geographical way to split them up.  Do you know of any docs that describe the bandwidth requirements?

[schepp · Accepted solution]

Hey,

I saw a whitepaper about vCenter 5.0 performance in Remote Offices from 2012 that might be interesting for you:

blog:  vCenter 5.0 Performance in Remote Offices and Branch Offices (ROBO) | VMware VROOM! Blog - VMware Bl...

whitepaper: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-WP-Performance-vCenter.pdf

Regards

[mdterp]

I wish I would have check this thread sooner!  I found that same PDF early in the afternoon. 

This doc talks about a test bed of:

In the experiments, we used one vCenter host with a SQL Server database to support a representative vCenter

inventory in the ROBO environment. The vCenter had 640 total VMs in a configuration of 32 ESXi hosts and 20

VMs per host. The distributed resource scheduler (DRS) and high availability (HA) were enabled on the vCenter to

manage these hosts and VMs. Avirtual distributed switch (vDS) was created on the vCenterto manage the

network configuration of hosts and VMs. Each host and its 20 VMs were connected to an exclusive port group.

Since my config is so small and I don't understand really all the metrics and bandwidth, THEN combine that with my lack of true knowledge of how much bandwidth is at each of my sites I think my config of 2 hosts in each site and at most 4 VMs at each site I think one vCenter would work.  One on the east coast and one on the west coast might even be overkill.

[pierreLx]

You are right, one vCenter would be enough with 5 vm per site but if it grows you can get latency doing simple tasks on your VC.