3.1 Zones and Resource Groups
A Cloud Manager zone is an Orchestration Server and its managed resources (hosts, clusters, resource pools, networks, storage, and so forth). Within a zone, these resources are organized into resource groups, as shown in the following illustration.
A resource group identifies a collection of hosts (and their associated networks and storage). When a workload is deployed, it is assigned to the resource group and provisioned using any of the resources within the group.
A resource group has the following characteristics:
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Supports only one hypervisor (VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, SUSE Xen, and KVM).
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Can include standalone hosts and clusters. Optionally, a resource group can be a vSphere resource pool. All host or pool resources (CPUs, memory, networks, disks, and so forth) should provide the same performance level so that a workload can run equally well on any of the resources.
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Cannot span zones. All resources in the group must reside in the same zone.
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Cannot share storage repositories with other resource groups.
As an example, you might form a Business Critical resource group that consists of high-performance vSphere hosts intended for critical production workloads. At the same time, you might have a Lab resource group that consists of standard-performance SUSE Xen hosts intended for non-production workloads.