6.0.1

Organizing Your Inventory 7
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. It might
involve multiple vCenter Server systems connected using Enhanced Linked Mode. 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:
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Will some virtual machines require dedicated resources?
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Will some virtual machines experience periodic spikes in workload?
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Will some virtual machines need to be administered as a group?
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Do you want to use multiple vSphere Standard Switches, or you want to have a single vSphere
Distributed Switch per data center?
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Do you want to use vMotion and Distributed Resource Management with certain virtual machines but
not others?
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Will some virtual objects require one set of system permissions, while other objects will require a
dierent set of permissions?
The left pane of the vSphere Web Client displays your vSphere inventory. You can add and arrange objects
in any way with the following restrictions:
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The name of an inventory object must be unique with its parent.
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vApp names must be unique within the Virtual Machines and Templates view.
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System permissions are inherited and cascade.
Tasks for Organizing Your Inventory
Populating and organizing your inventory involves the following activities:
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Create data centers.
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Add hosts to the data centers.
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Organize inventory objects in folders.
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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.
VMware, Inc.
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