Design question: vCenter Server just for vCloud or not?

[Gabrie1]

Hi

I'm working on a design in which a vCloud Director environment will be run next to an existing vSphere environment in which we host customers. We'll soon be upgrading the vSphere environment to 5.1 and hope to deliver a vCloud environment to our customers this year. In the current design there is just one vCenter Server for the whole environment and one for the DR environment.

In the new design I want to build a separate management vCenter environment. I found a list of arguments pro and con for a separate management cluster. Now the next step is adding the vCloud. Technically I wouldn't need a new vCenter Server for the vCloud environment. A separate cluster woud do. But..... what is the smartest thing to do? Adding another vCenter Server just because it is nice, doesn't cut it with my boss.

Pro:

- Different vCenter Servers will reduce the impact on both environments when upgrading.

Con:

- Cost for running two vCenter Servers plus Windows Server license and SQL Server license

- Linked Mode needed to get a good overview of both environments

Would love to hear your thoughts about this.

Gabrie

[JayhawkEric]

We originally used the same vCenter as the rest of our environment but ended up separating it out as we are a software development shop and having VCD put a lot of load on our vCenter.  It also helps with upgrades as we use a lot of View and they can be at different vCenter levels depending on updates/features within the product that we may want to use.

One issue we saw when testing VCD connected to an environment with other clusters in it was that we got disk space alerts on datastores not used on VCD hosts.  Once we change to using storage profiles it helped but we still get them from time to time even then the datastore is set to disabled within VCD and it's not a part of any storage profile.

Eric

[--Norton--]

You could use your existing VC to host the management cluster VMs and VC for the vCloud.

Then use the new VC purely for the cloud environment. As mentioned previously this will allow your current vc to continue but more importantly you now have a seperate administration route for your cloud environment meaning a greater granularity of roles and responsibility. Also you may well have additional licenses etc for your cloud env that will now be purely on the cloud vc and wont be confussed elsewhere.