How Many Virtual Centers?

[DCTony]

I'm working on a project that will have 40+ hosts divided among 4 data centers. Each data center is in a different state in the U.S. covering from coast to coast. What's the best practice for the virtual center? Should I have one VC at Headquarters with each data center defined inside the VC or should each data center have it's own VC? Is anyone else doing something along these lines?

[weinstein5]

Both will work well - I have seen both being implemented - In my view the driving factor will be the reliability of the WAN form HQ to each datacenter because if it is not stable you will see the ESX servers becoming disconnected -

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[Troy_Clavell]

I think it all depends on connectivity between all the sites. I mean having a single vCenter Server would be easier for administration purposes. But if connectivity is not ideal, then you probably would be better off adding a vCenter instance into each site.

We have 4 vCenter Servers here, that are all local and it is sometimes a bit of a headache to find out which guest is where and what vCenter Server is managing what Hosts.

[cheeko]

As already mentioned that basically depends on your WAN.

Organisation and regulatory restrictions probably also lead you in one or the oder direction.

This doc might help:

Proven Practice: ROBO - Managing Remote ESX Hosts Over WAN with VirtualCenter

http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1144

[raadek · Accepted solution]

Another question: what is the DR strategy for this company? Do some/all of these datacentres act as fail-over targets in a case of an outage somewhere else?

If that's the case, then VC is really needed both at the fail-over source & target (e.g. that is what SRM requires)

Regards.

[williambishop]

Until he gets back. Yes, I believe he mentioned that they are failovers for each other.

[DCTony]

Yes, each site will have a sister site that it will be the failover site for. SRM hasn't been purchased yet, but it is probably phase two. vFoglight has also been purchased. I haven't used it, but it's my understanding that you can manage multiple Virtual Centers from it?

[Troy_Clavell]

I am not sure about the ability of vFoglight to manage multiple instances of vCenter. I have been using the VC Administrator Portal. Although not the perfect solution it is somewhat federated.

Here is a link if interested

http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcadminportal