VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized way to control and monitor the virtual infrastructure. It has been widely deployed in a remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) environment to manage ESXi hosts that are distributed over large geographical distances over a wide range of networks with different network characteristics, including low/high bandwidth, network latency, and packet error rates.

In this paper, VMware performs a comprehensive study of vCenter Server performance with a ROBO use case for the VMware vCenter 6.7 release.

They demonstrate that vCenter Server performs well in the ROBO environment for both network bandwidth use, as well as virtual machine and ESXi host task execution times. Instead of a bandwidth restriction, they observed that network latency has a bigger impact on the overall performance.

As the network latency between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts increases, the average operation latency also increases. The experimental results also show how efficiently vCenter Server executes VM operations in high-latency networks: The average VM operation execution time increases much more slowly when network latency increases by several times.