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Overview of Zones on Logical Datacenter Diagrams

In Logical Datacenter Designer, you can represent communication boundaries in your datacenter using zones. Zones can represent physical boundaries, such as servers in another building or on another virtual local area network (VLAN), or represent logical boundaries, like a firewall. Common examples of zones include the Internet or a perimeter network.

Zones do not need to correspond to physical elements in the datacenter and while they typically represent communication boundaries, you can also use them to represent other things. After adding a zone to a logical datacenter diagram, you can perform the following tasks:

  • Add logical servers or zones to the zone.

  • Specify points for inbound and outbound communication on the zone.

  • Define communication pathways to, from, and within the zone.

  • Configure the zone using the Settings and Constraints Editor. This includes:

    • Constraining the kinds of logical servers that the zone can contain.

    • Constraining the communication protocols that can pass into or out of the zone.

    • Adding custom settings to the zone. These settings are captured in the deployment report.

  • Create a reusable prototype of the configured zone and add it to the Toolbox.

The following sections contain more information about these tasks.

Add Logical Servers or Zones

Specifying Communication with Zones

Configuring Zones

Creating Reusable Prototypes

Add Logical Servers or Zones

You can add a zone to a logical datacenter diagram by dragging it from the Toolbox. Zones appear on the diagram as rectangles with dashed lines. Zones can contain logical servers and other zones. For more information, see the following topics:

Specifying Communication with Zones

In the Distributed System Designers, all communication pathways are specified by connections made through endpoints. Zone endpoints are the circular shapes on the edge of the zone. Zone endpoints can be inbound, outbound, or bi-directional. Connections appear as lines with arrows indicating the direction of communication.

For more information, see the following topics:

Configuring Zones

Using the Settings and Constraints Editor, you can specify which types of logical servers the zone can contain and what communication protocols can be used to communicate with those servers from outside the zone. For example, you can define a zone to represent a firewall that enables HTTP through Port 80.

You can also create user-defined constraints to require a particular configuration for logical servers hosted within the zone. For example, you can require that IIS Web servers support a certain version of the common language runtime or that Web sites not exceed a specified number of connections. You can also create custom settings on the zone or zone endpoints. These settings cannot be used to create constraints, but they are captured in the deployment report.

For more information, see the following topics:

Creating Reusable Prototypes

You can reuse zones by creating custom prototypes of ones you have designed and configured.

For more information, see the following topics:

See Also

Other Resources

Defining Zones in the Datacenter