Organizing vCenter

I have recently been asked what I thought was the best way to organize things in vCenter? I have personally used several different methods to organize virtual machines in different ways. I started to wonder how other VMware administrators were organizing their own environments and if there were any common methods to this. Let’s take a look at the different ways I have organized things in previous deployments.
The different methods that I have used to organize my environments 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 view.
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 classroom and as examples when talking about resource groups. Resource group settings only take effect when contention happens on the host. If there is no contention, then these groups give you the ability to group virtual machines together based on operating system. I have used a “Windows” resource group as well as a “Linux” resource group to separate the different systems. This can also be used to separate teams and the virtual machines that each maintain, as well as having “high” and “low” groups for the most important and least important virtual machines. In other words, examples like the development or sales department virtual machines could be grouped in this manner. I have also created resource groups for VDI deployments, putting each VMware View pool in their own resource group limiting processor usage. I have also seen people create resource groups based on the type of application, but vSphere now gives the ability to use vApps to accomplish that type of configuration.
So, nothing too exciting with the resource groups, just a pretty straight forward configuration. Now, I have also organized Virtual Machines in the folders view. You can 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 or to have all the virtual desktops organized in a folder and then create sub-folders by department. In one engagement, I actually created folders based on the virtual machine owner, so I would be able to determine who was responsible for each virtual machine if an issue arose. Moving forward, I started to use custom columns in vCenter for application owner and other information to be able to get in touch with that person. You can also create custom columns to turn the main virtual machine page into a main source of information about all of the virtual machines. Eventually these columns would have the same information that the server database would have and could replace the server database for any information about the virtual machines.
How do you organize your vCenter? Inquiring minds what to know!
by Howard Cathcart, Director of Enterprise Services October 25th, 2009