Posey's Tips & Tricks
Strategies for Defining Host Groups in System Center Virtual Machine Manager
Organizing Hyper-V hosts into well-structured groups and using consistent naming conventions in System Center Virtual Machine Manager is key to maintaining scalable and manageable infrastructure.
Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager is the preferred solution for managing multiple Hyper-V hosts. One of the main benefits to using the Virtual Machine Manager console is that it allows you to see all of your Hyper-V virtual machines through a single pane of glass, as opposed to having to deal with Hyper-V on a server by server basis, as is the case with the Hyper-V Manager. As great as this consolidated management might seem however, the single pane of glass view can become problematic if you accumulate too many Hyper-V hosts. When that happens, the best option for maintaining ease of management is to group your Hyper-V servers into host groups.
A host group is just a container that can be used to group host servers together. Virtual Machine Manager automatically creates a top level host group called All Hosts, but you can also create as many additional host groups as you might need. The key however, is to come up with a strategy for keeping your host groups organized.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a one size fits all strategy for organizing your host groups. An approach that works well for one organization might not work out so well for another. That being the case, I recommend beginning the process by defining a primary organizational principle. As an example, you might organize your host groups by geographic location. This could be anything from the region in which a host resides down to the rack where you have placed the server.
Another common approach is to base your host groups on function. This might mean organizing host based on whether they are used for production workloads or for development, testing, or training. Similarly, you could group hosts based on cluster membership, hardware capabilities, or nearly any other factor.
Once you have come up with a basic idea of the basic organizational technique used for placing Hyper-V hosts into host groups, the next thing that you should do is to come up with a naming convention that you can use.
If you have (or could potentially have in the future) more than just a few host groups then it's extremely important to come up with a naming convention. This naming convention should convey the host group's purpose as well as any additional relevant details. This naming convention should be applied to all host groups, so that all host groups are named in a consistent way.
Once again, every organization will have to come up with its own naming convention. My advice is to come up with a basic naming structure that you can use for host group naming and then come up with codes that you can use within that structure. As an example, if the first part of the host group name conveys the region where the hosts within the host group reside, then you will need to come up with some region codes. As an example, you might use US for United States, or NA for North America. Hosts located in Europe might use a region code of EU. The important thing is to be consistent with your use of codes.
I also recommend trying to make your codes as intuitive as possible. That will help to prevent deviations from the established naming conventions, and it will make it a lot easier to interpret a host group name. One way to accomplish this is to use standard abbreviations wherever you can. As an example, Development, Testing, and Production could be abbreviated as Dev, Test, and Prod. Similarly, virtual desktop hosts could be classified as VDI, while systems related to backup and disaster recovery could use the abbreviation DR.
Often you may find that you need to use a naming convention that is based around the use of multiple codes. As an example, a host group name might be made up of region-datacenter-function.
As you establish your host group naming conventions, there are two things that are important to keep in mind. First, make sure that your naming conventions are adaptable. Whatever naming convention you use, it needs to be able to adapt to technology changes and to changes with regards to the way that your organization is structured. Don't lock yourself into a naming convention that is so rigid that it becomes impossible to adapt to these types of change.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it's important to document your naming conventions and any abbreviations that you use. Even if the naming conventions and abbreviations make perfect sense to you, someone else might not find them to be quite as intuitive. You can do your current and future team members a favor by documenting the naming conventions and abbreviations, as well as providing some examples of their use, and possibly even an explanation as to why this naming convention was chosen.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.