Any suggestion on managing large no. of images and resource pools?

[ChrisCFY]

Would like to seek advice on how to manage large number of images on VirtualCenter.

We currently have more than 100 images owned by different users for different purposes.

Some of the images are in folders based on the user's department or usages. Others are not in any of the folders.

When we first login via Virtual Infrastructure Client, we would be shown many images.

The problem arises when:

\- searching for a particular image based on name usually returns many hits;

\- searching for an image created for a particular usage/ purpose usually returns many hits too

Questions are:

\- any suggestions or recommendations on how to manage the images so that we could perform the above mentioned search more easily?

\- any recommendations on 3rd party tools that could help in providing additional administration on top of features provided in VirtualCenter?

Thanks in advance

Chris

[VirtualNoitall]

Hello,

We currently have over 100 virtual machines in an environment with capacity for upwards of 500. Our approach is based around folder hierarchy using divisions which are made up of teams which are made up of individuals. The paradigm is working very well to date so we have not looked into other options. Naming standards though are of paramount importance to us. Machines get named based on a user or group, if they are accessed frequently by multiple users, and virtual machine names are identical to the actual machine names. This makes it very easy to track who owns a virtual machine and therefore makes it easier to locate the virtual machine(s) you are trying to find.

[ChrisCFY]

Hi

Thanks for your reply.

Regarding your recommendation on naming standards, would there be any reference or example of the names we could refer to?

We've some images that cross 2 subnets. How would you recommend we name the images?

We also have a requirement to keep track of what softwares are installed in the VM images. How would you recommend we track this requirement?

We've a constant challenge of allowing users to clone images while still not utilizing all our limited storage space for the images. Imagine users keep cloning images or creating images. Ultimately we would run of disk space. How would you recommend we manage this process, allowing as much flexibility to the users while still mantaining control of the usage of the disk space?

Thanks in advance.