I was recently asked what I thought was the best way to organize things in vCenter?  I personally have used several different methods to organize things in different ways. I started to wonder how other admins were organizing their own environments and if there was any common methods of madness to this. First let’s take a look at the different ways I have organized things and then I will propose the same question to you and see what kinds of responses I can get from you, in the audience.

The different methods that I have used to organize my environment have been mainly with the use of resource groups and folders.  Each of these options is located in different views; resource groups are located in the host and clusters view and folders are located in the virtual machine and template.

Starting with resource groups, I have built different groups in a few different ways in different clusters.  Creating resource groups based on importance, such as high, med and low has been the most basic configuration that has been taught by VMware in the classes and as examples when talking about resource groups.  Now resource groups setting only take effect when contention happens on the host.  If there is no contention then these groups give you the ability to group together virtual machines based on operating system.  I have had a “Windows” resource group as well as “Linux” resource group to separate the different groups and or teams and the virtual machines that each maintained as well as having “high” and “low” groups for the most important and least important or in other words, the things like the development virtual machines.  I have also seen people create resource groups based on the type of application but vSphere now gives us that ability to use vApps to accomplish that kind of configuration.

So nothing too exciting with the resource groups, just a pretty straight forward configuration.  Now, I also organized differently in the folders view.  I would actually create different folders based on the application running on the virtual machine.  One example would be to have all the exchange servers in one folder.  In one case I actually created folders based on the virtual machine owner so I would easily know who is responsible for any virtual machine when issues arise.  Moving forward in time I really started to use custom columns in vCenter for application owner and all information to be able to get hold of that person.  As time went on it I created more and more custom columns to turn the main virtual machine page into my main source of information about all the virtual machines.  In the end these columns would have all the information that the server database had listed and ended up replacing the server database for any information about the virtual machines.

Now we have gotten to the part of audience participation.  How do you organize your vCenter?  Inquiring minds what to know!

ESX, Organization, vCenter, vmware

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Virtual Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.