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Table Of Contents

Organizing Your Inventory 3

Plan how you will set up your virtual environment. A large vSphere implementation might contain several

virtual data centers with a complex arrangement of hosts, clusters, resource pools, and networks. Smaller

implementations might require a single virtual data center with a much less complex topology. Regardless

of the scale of your virtual environment, consider how the virtual machines it will support are going to be

used and administered.

Here are questions you should answer as you create and organize an inventory of virtual objects:

Will some virtual machines require dedicated resources?

Will some virtual machines experience periodic spikes in workload?

Will some virtual machines need to be administered as a group?

Do you want to use multiple vSphere Standard Switches, or you want to have a single vSphere

Distributed Switch per data center?

Do you want to use vMotion and Distributed Resource Management with certain virtual machines but

not others?

Will some virtual objects require one set of system permissions, while other objects will require a

different set of permissions?

The left pane of the vSphere Client displays your vSphere inventory. You can add and arrange objects in

any way with the following restrictions:

The name of an inventory object must be unique with its parent.

vApp names must be unique within the Virtual Machines and Templates view.

System permissions are inherited and cascade.

Tasks for Organizing Your Inventory

Populating and organizing your inventory involves the following activities:

Create data centers.

Add hosts to the data centers.

Organize inventory objects in folders.

Setup networking by using vSphere Standard Switches or vSphere Distributed Switches. To use

services such as vMotion, TCP/IP storage, Virtual SAN, and Fault Tolerance, setup VMkernel

networking for these services. For more information, see vSphere Networking.

Configure storage systems and create datastore inventory objects to provide logical containers for

storage devices in your inventory. See vSphere Storage.

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