As VMware vCenter has become the most popular tool to manage VMware vSphere ESXi hosts and virtual machines (VMs), customers have deployed vCenter in many networks, such as local area network (LAN) with high-bandwidth and low-latency links, and wide area network (WAN) with low-bandwidth and high-latency links.
Deploying vCenter in a remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) environment is a representative use case for customers who have ESXi hosts distributed over large geographical distances. These customers choose to centralize the management of ESXi hosts and VMs by keeping only one vCenter and configuring it to manage ESXi hosts over WAN.
To help customers understand vCenter performance over WAN, VMware has studied the performance of VMware vCenter Server 5.0 in the ROBO environment in this white paper. First, to establish a baseline, we evaluated the time and bandwidth consumption of vCenter tasks over LAN (high bandwidth, low latency). Then, VMware evaluated the time and bandwidth consumption of vCenter tasks in five representative WAN (low bandwidth, high-latency) cases.
The experimental results show that vCenter performs well in the ROBO environment in terms of both time and bandwidth consumption. For a vCenter task, time consumption increases very slowly when network latency1 increases by several times. Furthermore, network bandwidth is not saturated even if it decreases from 1.5 Mbps to 64 Kbps.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-WP-Performance-vCenter.pdf