Vcenter Managing host across Remote subnets

[abs001]

How fesiable is it to mananage two Datacentres across remote sites with one Virtual Center Server.

- Two node cluster per datacenter

- Remote subnets are not gigabit connected only 100mb MPLS

- NAS storage at respective sites

Thanks

[probie]

We have 1 clusters with 2 hosts on a remote location and another cluster with 12 hosts at our main location. There's gigabit between datacenters. All the hosts are now managed by a single vCenter server, however after the upgrade to VC4 we started experiencing freezes.

So we are now planning to set up a 2nd VC server at our remote location. Both VC servers will then be each other's standby VC server. With SRM you need a VC per location anyway and theVC servers can't be linked.

The only thing which gets more troublesome is the cloning of machines. We will need to export and import them or backup and restore.

[jbogardus]

What is your main reason for not waining to use multiple VC servers? Allocating another server configuration for VC, decentralizing management, ...

As far as the issue of allocating another server image for VC you could run VC in a VM with little cost overhead

As far as decentralizing management with multiple VCs, vCenter Linked Mode provided vSphere is designed to allow centralized management of multiple VCs

I'm mentioning this because unless you have very good network connectivity between the remote sites I think you will be happier with that. I did work at one clients site where they had a single VC controlling ESX servers across remote links and performance was poor. There would be a signficant delay for the VC console refresh on every mouse click, and ESX servers disconnected from the console a few times. I think there was a problem with VC license checks on each action with that version which may be resolved now, but you never know if a version update will reintroduce a similar problem in the future.

[admin]

Hi,

It is possible to manage 2 Datacentres across remote sites with one Virtual Center Server. But you might face issues due to slow network. So the better idea would be to have separate vCenters for each datacenter and use them in Linked mode. This way you can manage both the datacenters from the same viClient with less network issues

-Sandeep