Hardware

Zone

What is Zone?

A zone is a logical group of resources such as clusters, L2 networks, and primary storages. Zone is the largest resource scope defined in the Cloud.

Basics

In a data center, a zone corresponds to an equipment room.
A zone defines a visible boundary. Sub-resources within the same zone are visible mutually and can form a certain relationship. However, sub-resources within different zones are invisible mutually and cannot form mutual relationships.

Characteristics

Zone isolation:
Isolates physical sub-resources such as primary storages and hosts in different zones, ensuring stability and fault tolerance to the maximum extent.
Reduces network delay and allows for faster access.
Resource management:
You can set a platform administrator for each zone. A platform administrator can manage one or more zones.
The resources of each project can belong to only one area.
Global view:
After you plan a zone, you can view all the resources in the zone on a dedicated dashboard. You can view the resource usage by KVM or vCenter.

Considerations

When you plan a zone, note that:

Hosts in the same physical layer 2 broadcast domain must be in the same zone. These hosts can be grouped as one or more clusters.
A physical layer 2 broadcast domain cannot span multiple zones. Instead, it must be mapped as an L2 network in a single zone.
A primary storage cannot span multiple zones. Instead, it must be mapped as a primary storage in a single zone.
A data center can have multiple zones.
A zone can have one or more backup storages attached.
- Resources in a zone, such as a primary storage, can only access the backup storages attached to the zone.
- A backup storage can be deleted from a zone. After the backup storage is deleted, resources in the zone will not see the backup storage any more.
- If a backup storage is no longer accessible to resources of a zone due to network typology changes in a data center, you can detach the backup storage from this zone.
- To better manage the relationship between backup storages and zones, the UI specifies that a backup storage can only be attached to one zone at a time. That is, a backup storage that has been attached to a zone cannot be reattached to the other zone. When you add a backup storage in the UI, the backup storage will be automatically attached to the current zone. When you delete a zone, you will directly delete the backup storage attached to the zone.

Create a Zone

On the main menu of ZStack Cloud, choose Resource Center > Hardware > Computing Facility > Zone. On the Zone page, click Create Zone. Then, the Create Zone page is displayed.

On the displayed page, set the following parameters:

Name: Enter a name for the zone.
Description: Optional. Enter a description for the zone.