vcenter best practices setup topology

[ashrafkhalifah]

Dear All,

we have 3 sites, two sites (datacenters) in the same buliding and one site in another building (secondery site or backup site), we are planning to deploy Vmware, so we have the following opthins:

1-treating each site as seperate site from its vcenter (3 vcenters servers)

2-treating the first two sites as one site and manage them from one vcenter server and in the third site (backup site) installaing second instance of vcenter.

we will also buy SRM licenses.

so what are the advatages and disadvantages of each option or what are the features that I will loss if I traet the first two sites as speated sites?

[vcpguy]

Please tell us some more information about the below mentioned points.

1) Number of ESX hosts

2) Your workload

3) Backup of your environment

4) Roles and Responsibility

5) SRM - If your primary and diaster site is close to one another, I don't think SRM is a good idea. If your primary center goes down due to earthquake or other calamities, chances of your DR site going down is also very high.

Thanks

[chriswahl]

Some general downsides of option 1:

• Lose the ability to migrate VMs between the datacenters
• Additional cost of a vCenter license
• Another management point, database, and server to patch / maintain

Not being aware of how you are configured from a logical layout, the advantages are unknown to me. It may be that your environment is so large that you need to split the sites up into 2 different vCenter servers, or perhaps you have production at one site and pre-prod on the other.

[eeg3]

I'd look into using Linked Mode regardless of which option you go with (personally, I'd say option 2 is better than option 1).

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - you have received some great advice - to add if you do go with SRM you will need two license of VCenter one for your primary site and one for the recovery site - I do think since bothe of your primary sites are in the same building I would go with a single vCenter -