A data center is a high-level logical entity for all physical and logical resources in the environment. You can have multiple data centers and all the data centers are controlled from a single Administration Portal. For more information, see Data Centers in the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager: Administration Guide.

When you install Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager, a default data center (Default), which you can rename and configure. You can also create and configure additional data centers. To initialize any data center, you must add a cluster, a host, and a storage domain:

• Cluster - A cluster is an association of physical hosts sharing the same datacenter storage domains and having compatible processors. Every cluster belongs to a data center; every host belongs to a cluster. A cluster has to have a minimum of one host and at least one active host is required to connect the system to a storage pool.
• KVM Host - Hosts, or hypervisors, are the physical servers that run virtual machines. You must have at least one host in a cluster. KVM hosts in a datacenter must have access to the same storage domains.
• Storage Domain - Data centers must have at least one data storage domain. Set up the data storage domain of the type required for the data center: NFS, iSCSI, FCP or Local.

Logical networks are not required to initialize a data center, but are required for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager to communicate with all components of a data center. Logical networks are also used for the virtual machines to communicate with hosts and storage, for connecting clients to virtual machine resources, and for migrating virtual machines between the hosts in a cluster.