A custom data center is a user-defined container for a group of objects that includes clusters, hosts, and virtual machines. Custom data centers provide capacity analytics and capacity badge computations based on the objects it contains. You can use custom data centers to forecast and analyze the capacity needs for your environment.

When you create a custom data center, you can include multiple cluster objects that span multiple vCenter Server instances. For example, you might have a production environment that spans multiple clusters, and you must monitor and manage the performance and capacity of the entire production environment.

After you create your custom data center, you can select it in the list of custom data centers to display a summary of its health, risk, and efficiency. To access the list of custom data centers, click Environment > Custom Data Centers.

This view displays the top alerts for the data center. To examine the capacity remaining for the custom data center, click the Capacity tab.