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letoatrads
Expert
Expert

Single central vCenter or One per office...

Ok, here is the scenerio.

I'll have 4 larger offices spread out across North America. One west coast, One Central, and 2 East coast. Each office will have 3 to 4 ESX 3.5 hosts. What would be the recommended best practices for vCenter? Would you recommend a vCenter in each office, or would a single vCenter in a central site suffice? The offices interact via DS3 lines, so pipe speed shouldn't be an issue - would latency perhaps cause problems? The metrics coming back to vCenter....how much is this on average per host?

Thanks in advance for advice from anyone doing similar or having designed similar!

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

You will have to go for a single vCenter if you are planning to do operation like cloning across your labs Smiley Happy

-Sandeep

letoatrads
Expert
Expert

Yep, I definitely like the consolidated approached....and actually the way I had it at my last company. I just want to make sure I'm not going to put an excessive strain on the network infrastructure with the monitoring and management being done across the wire.

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ygao
Contributor
Contributor

I would create one centeral VC and create 4 DataCenter for each location and add ESX to each DC. It's alot easier to manage. If you have 4 VCs at each location, you have 4 servers to manage and there is cost of MSFT license and also maintenance cost. Think about how long it takes for you update MSFT patches for 4 VCs rather than 1vc.

We only create separate VCs if the environment is out of country, like in EMEA and APAC.