vCenter Managing Multiple Clusters

[Dakarai]

I am fairly new to VMware (paid editions) and I was wondering if someone could help answer a questions for me.

1. Can I create multiple server clusters to be managed? I have a coupld Dell r710's that I want in one cluster, and three Dell 2950's that I want in a different cluster.

2. Can they be managed from the same vCenter Server?

For give me if I am not posing this question properly. By clusters, I mean servers that are offering their resources (mem, proc) to a shared group of VMs.

Thanks in advance!

[dtracey]

Hello Dak,

You can manage multiple DRS (& HA) clusters per VirtualCenter. Your only limit is performance or 200 hosts, whichever bottoms out first!

For example we run 3 clusters in our development environment, each with 3 hosts. These clusters are Test, Dev and Staging.

Hope this helps.

Dan

[Dakarai]

I need to know if the hosts (in all clusters) all have to been the same or can I have a mixture of server models for each cluster. For example, I want a cluster that consists of (3) Dell 2950s and a cluster that consists of (2) Dell R710s.

[dtracey]

No, hosts across clusters can have dissimilar hardware. The important thing is that hosts WITHIN a cluster have compatible CPUs for vMotion and DRS. Have a look at the compatibility matrix for Dell.

Example - one of my clusters has hosts with AMD Opteron 8214's, and one cluster has hosts with Intel Xeon's. You'll just need to bear in mind the difficulties that can arise when you want to move VM's around (cold migrating etc).

Hope this helps.

Dan

[NTurnbull]

Hi, yes you can have multiple clusters being managed by the same vCenter server. Have a look at the resource management guide (ESX3.5 & VC2.5 or vSphere.

Thanks,

Neil