Naming Standard for Virtual Infrastructure

Like a new mom and dad, have you been given any thought to what naming standards you plan to use for your new virtual environment?

The reason I said naming standards is because you will probably have names for the VirtualCenter or VMM, datacenter, clusters, data stores (LUNs), ESX or Hyper-V host servers, VLAN tags, VM guests, user groups, alert rules and possibly few more services and roles.

I kid you not – six months after you setup your virtual infrastructure it will dawn on you that you should have thought this out sooner!

Uh, why did we call the data stores datastore-hp-8000-01 thru datastore-hp-8000-128 even the NetApp ones?

And, why did we call all our VLAN tags “temp-v120” through “temp-v897” when they are not “temp”?

Now you have to go back and change all that stuff and that could break scripts if you have any running, not to mention it is a slow process and what about documentation?

What are your best practices for naming?

Nip the naming standards in the bud ASAP because your VM environment will grow very fast and soon it will look like a spam email with upper-case and lower-case names, and host name like Viagra and Mickey Mouse, get the point?

I recommend a naming convention that uses a tree: Datacenter>cluster>host>datastore

• Ex. Datastore = DC1-CL1-((server name) (rack id))-((LUN ID)-(Datastore ID))
•  Ex. VLAN tag = VLAN1 (all upper-case)

Remember to keep names simple and don’t let someone get lazy and cut corners or it will be you cleaning up the mess.;-)