Ok - in my case all traffic is in one datacenter and there is no DMZ involved. So it seems like in this scenario this leads to a decision with two possible tradeoffs:
1. If vCenter is on the same network as my ESXi vmkernel management ports, then vCenter's database also needs to be on that same network. I don't want that network to be a virtual machine network in general, except for vCenter since it communicates directly with them and its database since I want lowest latency between them. That means that other management vms such as: Update manager, VCAC, vCO, Log insight, vCM, databases for these VMs, chargeback manager, etc. would all be on a different network than vcenter, because I don't want to make my ESXi management traffic network a network for every VM under the sun. The tradeoff there is that all these other virtualization and cloud management vms have to communicate with vCenter on a different network. They have to be routed meaning traffic between them always has to go to a physical switch and back, even if the VMs are on the same ESXi host since ESXi doesn't do routing.
2. If VCenter is on a different network than my ESXi hosts, then it can be on the same network as all other VMs that might want to communicate with it with low-latency connections. However, then traffic between vCenter and ESXi always has to be routed and has whatever additional latency is involved.
Given I have these tradeoffs what is the best strategy for grouping:
-Group vCenter and its database with ESXi vmkernels
or
-Group vCenter with its other management vms
and why?
Thanks!
