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:
Supports only one hypervisor (VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, SUSE Xen, and KVM).
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.
Cannot span zones. All resources in the group must reside in the same zone.
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.