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 creates a Default data center at installation. You can also create new data centers that are managed from the same Administration Portal. For example, you may choose to have different data centers for different physical locations, business units, or for reasons of security.

The system administrator, as the superuser, can manage all aspects of the platform (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 automatically has permission to manage all the objects in that data center, including storage domains, clusters, and hosts.