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| <section id="about-regions"> |
| <title>About Regions</title> |
| <para>To increase reliability of the cloud, you can optionally group resources into multiple geographic regions. |
| A region is the largest available organizational unit within a &PRODUCT; deployment. |
| A region is made up of several availability zones, where each zone is roughly equivalent to a datacenter. |
| Each region is controlled by its own cluster of Management Servers, running in one of the zones. |
| The zones in a region are typically located in close geographical proximity. |
| Regions are a useful technique for providing fault tolerance and disaster recovery.</para> |
| <para>By grouping zones into regions, the cloud can achieve higher availability and scalability. |
| User accounts can span regions, so that users can deploy VMs in multiple, widely-dispersed regions. |
| Even if one of the regions becomes unavailable, the services are still available to the end-user through VMs deployed in another region. |
| And by grouping communities of zones under their own nearby Management Servers, the latency of communications within the cloud is reduced |
| compared to managing widely-dispersed zones from a single central Management Server. |
| </para> |
| <para> |
| Usage records can also be consolidated and tracked at the region level, creating reports or invoices for each geographic region. |
| </para> |
| <mediaobject> |
| <imageobject> |
| <imagedata fileref="./images/region-overview.png" /> |
| </imageobject> |
| <textobject><phrase>region-overview.png: Nested structure of a region.</phrase></textobject> |
| </mediaobject> |
| <para>Regions are visible to the end user. When a user starts a guest VM on a particular &PRODUCT; Management Server, |
| the user is implicitly selecting that region for their guest. |
| Users might also be required to copy their private templates to additional regions to enable creation of guest VMs using their templates in those regions.</para> |
| </section> |