Chapter 3. Cloud Infrastructure Concepts
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The benefit of organizing infrastructure into zones is to provide physical isolation and redundancy. For
example, each zone can have its own power supply and network uplink, and the zones can be widely
separated geographically (though this is not required).
A zone consists of:
• One or more pods. Each pod contains one or more clusters of hosts and one or more primary
storage servers.
• (Optional) If zone-wide primary storage is desired, a zone may contain one or more primary storage
servers, which are shared by all the pods in the zone. (Supported for KVM and VMware hosts)
• Secondary storage, which is shared by all the pods in the zone.
Zones are visible to the end user. When a user starts a guest VM, the user must select a zone for
their guest. Users might also be required to copy their private templates to additional zones to enable
creation of guest VMs using their templates in those zones.
Zones can be public or private. Public zones are visible to all users. This means that any user may
create a guest in that zone. Private zones are reserved for a specific domain. Only users in that
domain or its subdomains may create guests in that zone.
Hosts in the same zone are directly accessible to each other without having to go through a firewall.
Hosts in different zones can access each other through statically configured VPN tunnels.