Building QA-Environment -- Suggestion , requirements

[hareshn]

Hello,

We are planning to build QA Environment, and required your suggestion and experience if you have deployed same in your organization.

Our Production is running with Cisco UCS hardware with vSphere 6 Env.

we are planning to have additional chassis and add few blade server only for QA env.

As our Switch and FI are same for both the chassis we will be using same Management Network for both the environment  ( this will also allow us to use our existing Storage to map on the QA env)

Only Virtual machine which will be created on the QA- env will not talk to to Production Servers

Followings are the question which we are trying to figure out.

1) Do we have to keep separate vcenter?  ( Production vCenter is running on the Management network will it affect if i tried to install additional vCenter )

2) Domain name will be separate ( we are planning to have child domain and only allow the required traffic to communicate with QA-Domain controller to Production DC Domain controller )

any other thing which we need to keep in mind before implementing this ?

Haresh n

[vHaridas]

1) Do we have to keep separate vcenter? - One vCenter should be sufficient for new Hosts and VMs unless your Prod and QA VM/Host Inventory become too Big. vCenter maximum numbers are too Big but practically you can decide based on your VM, Host size, vCenter performance and any other requirements you may have.

2) Domain name will be separate - This will not matter, you can keep new VMs in QA domain. for QA ESXi Hosts DNS records you can create it in either on Prod or QA DNS. vCenter should able to connect with ESXi Hosts and name resolution work for Hosts.

    To restrict traffic of QA VMs you can have different VLANs and Trunk it to QA ESXi Hosts and do other restrictions at domain level.

[hareshn]

Thanks for your suggestion,

1) we have limited inventory but still do not want to mixed up Production and QA .. There is no issue with licensing, we have sufficient licenses for both Production and QA.

this question was came for best practices and typically other company setup and build environment

2) Domain question came in mind for below reason ..

after installing new vcenter it should disconnect my Production host cluster and join the new one ..  as both vcenter will run in the same Management network.

[vHaridas]

If you have License for Second vCenter, you can go for separate vCenter for QA without any issues.

if you go for Single vCenter, You can make new Cluster for QA Host and Vms, still manage Networking, users VM permission separately. This is ideal for small setup.

Separate vCenter's are recommended for big ESX/VM Inventories and if you are using vCenter's for different purpose ( QA and prod still includes in this)

e.g. in My setup, We have separate vCenter for Development and IT Production servers, vRealize Automation...etc.

But again each vCenter's Host count is 80+ and VM count is  1K to 4K in each vCenter.

2) Domain question came in mind for below reason -

if you go for separate QA vCenter, There is no reason to do anything with prod Host and VMs.

You can use same network VLAN for QA Host management IP or go for new VLANs for all QA Host, VMs to keep network traffic separate.

[hareshn]

If I add my new vCenter for QA environment  on the same Management vLAN, will it conflict with existing host which are part of the production vcenter?

[vHaridas]

No not at all.