The data center is the highest level container for all physical and logical resources within a managed virtual environment. The data center is a collection of clusters of Hosts. It owns the logical network (that is, the defined subnets for management, guest network traffic and storage network traffic) and the storage pool.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization contains a Default data center at installation. You can create new data centers that will also be managed from the single Administration Portal. For example, you may choose to have different data centers for different physical locations, business units, or for reasons of security. It is recommended that you do not remove the Default data center, instead set up new appropriately named data centers.

The system administrator, as the superuser, can manage all aspects of the platform, that is, data centers, storage domains, users, roles and permissions by default; however more specific administrative roles and permissions can be assigned to other users. For example, the enterprise may need a Data Center administrator for a specific data center, or a particular cluster may need an administrator. All system administration roles for physical resources have a hierarchical permission system. For example, a data center administrator will automatically have permission to manage all the objects in that data center - including storage domains, clusters and hosts.