I’ve never really taken advantage of vSphere tagging. I see the value but just never got around to digging in deep and fully exploring ways I could use it. I suspect that many vSphere admins are in the same boat. Ravi Soundararajan, Principal Engineer in the Performance Engineering group at VMware just wrote a best practice guide that I think you should consider adding to your reading list.
For those new to vSphere tags Nigel Hickey writes on the VMware vSphere Blog:
vSphere Tags were introduced in version 5.1 as a way to organize inventory objects such as VMs, Hosts, Datastores, etc., a much-needed feature for helping search for or group objects within vSphere. A Tag is basically a label that can be applied to vSphere inventory objects. When an administrator creates a tag, it is then assigned to a tag category. Categories allow the grouping of related tags. When a Category is created, you can specify associations of object types (such as; VM or Datastore) as well as whether more than one tag in a category can be applied to an object (ex; One Tag or Many Tags).
This guide will help explain scaling limits for tagging and will provide you with some actionable examples and tips for writing tagging code in PowerShell or Java. I know, the minute you read tagging ‘code’ you got a little excited. Don’t worry this guide will walk you through and explain everything you need. I think you will be surprised at how tagging can help improve your vSphere environment.
I would suggest you share this with your internal team and then talk through how you can best use tagging. If you are the sole IT person, don’t fear you can always reach out to the online community for help and insights.
Do you currently use tagging in your vSphere environment? Do you have plans on using tagging? How have you implemented tagging? Let me know on Twitter and let’s share with the community so others can see how easy this is.